Saint Fiona Bianco Xena:
The Essay: Reloaded

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When you enter the Saint Fiona Bianco Xena website you get some holy sounding choral music which is how you know this is a religious type situation with some venerable kinda things playing out. The music (by Mediafired 🤩) is calming, beginning almost cod-sacrosanct but growing into these beautiful layers, which makes sense since Saint Fiona Bianco Xena is a cross-pollinated saint, a digifusion of three people's ideas about the same person, which is how all people are, in the end, but this one has a cooler name, and it’s important to give things good names.

The music is the smeared concentrated voice paste of the masses, because the public figure is a parasocial vessel for the dreams and terror of the people, and this is a good time to be an avatar of terror if that’s your thing. But Saint Fiona Bianco Xena mostly seems like a benevolent generative force, creating DIY medical solutions. She oozes and extrudes, like the slugs that dominate this piece.

Slugs are a cornerstone of the Saint Fiona Bianco Xena franchise. The slug is a creature so rudimentary and elegant that it lends itself to narrative caulking, filling any crack. It is a resource, a material, a slime canvas, painted with the colors of life. It oozes mucus yet seems simply to be a concentrated mucus itself. As any book may tell you, the slug is a beast of supreme defense, merely seeking to exist. So when attacked, it becomes denser, more itself. When at peace, it exudes echoes of itself, slimy translucence. A simple unit of reflex, yet so innocuous that people are compelled to attack it, as in the multiple cases of humans voring banana slugs and acquiring a brain-destroying parasite such as a rat lungworm, as if in divine punishment. Far from an aesthetic whim, the slug proves itself a most saintly gastropod indeed.

So, this website. You scroll around with the WASD keys aka the Gamer's Alphabet. The flatness reminds me of the games of the Irish artist thecatamites, like his masterpiece 10 Beautiful Postcards, many of his pieces in the anthology 50 Short Games, or more obscurely Coby Castle, scrolling around a surface unbounded by movement limitations, every element combined onto the same plane, resisting the sinful modern urge to add sophistication or interactivity, to neurotically nest itself for the sake of nesting, like a childless harpy mother constructing empty aeries from the bones of adventurers. A hall of saints is for the people. When you enter a church, you shouldn’t have to 360 noscope just to see the angels.

Nonhierchical centerless scenes play out in every direction, showing us the divergent forms and relics of Saint Fiona Bianco Xena. This is the vaporwave lounge in between the battle royale of the Hieronymus Bosch garden. What if Where’s Waldo could fuck.

Found in the rubble of the Syxtercian cathedral after the Great Crypto War, this life-sized sculpture depicts the birth of Saint Fiona Bianco Xena.

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Present at her trial were her son Francis the Ungrateful, the last survivor of her 399 children, her biographer Anselm Farberfintch Jr., her guardian angel Puritanius and her first lover Igor, seen here facepalming - a gesture presumably symbolizing the decline of the Western Happy Times.

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Upon Saint Fiona’s death the SLUGGUN Blade was passed down to her successor November Xena. To this day it remains a heirloom gifted to the matriarch of the KRYSTAL-i network.

The lore of Saint Fiona Bianco Xena is relentlessly worldbuildy, wikian, because recent generations were not raised with simple, archetypal myths. Our attention was drawn to the, again, centerless, excessive narratives of editorless internet comics lasting decades, franchise characters that underwent countless convulsive permutations as they were eaten from within by the chestburster of capitalism, and wiki pages for toyetic shows with 500 episodes laid out like biblical genealogy. Bomper then betrayed the Isorangers. Bomper had 10 Power Cores. Bomper reappears in episode 371 as a love interest.

Narrative is mechanistically reproduced until the summaries become their own texture, not a hero’s journey, but the journey of all things, chaotic as a nano cloud. Because you recognize more than ever that we aren’t heroes, we’re bystanders to a hundred years of geologically seeded doom, fanfic for Geiger counters. Should have killed the politicians when you had the chance, before they buried their phylacteries in the concrete.

So there is nothing sacred about our role models. We know they’re replaceable, that their human quirks have been sequenced in labs and can be reproduced on demand. Like slugs, they are mere wads of reflex that reflect your actions. You tear them into a million quantum pieces in fanfic, and if they have flesh and bone they get torn between a million diametrically opposed ideologies competing for them on the internet. You call them sacred, soft and perfect, but there’s nothing sacred about penetrating them in every pore. When you say you love, what you mean is, you have no love. Not sacred, just scared.

Molluscwave is a music microgenre involving remixing famous 2020’s pop songs onto soft body physics and rolling them across procedural surfaces.

Molluscwave is dead.

Nothing much to say about that I just think it’s cool. Full-species conversion for music, the new nightcore. Changing the pitch of your entire body.

I wish the makers of this luck in their adventures. Don’t get complacent. Travel deep into the mucus.