Inverse - 📜 Cult week

Wednesday

Sept 14 2022

Whether it is a show, a movie, or an entire media franchise, we all have that one thing we can't get enough of. For me, it's a toss up between everything and anything related to Lord of the Rings and The Sopranos. I can't quite fathom which I have consumed more of — or which I have indulged more in the fandom culture.

For some though, fandom transcends the endless memes and relatively benign ritual of all watching three LotR films back to back on New Year's Day (hi!). Fandom can become so vital as to define one's life. At that point, is your fandom your religion? And more pointedly, is your fandom your cult? That's the question we grapple with in today's top story. And keep scrolling for more cult-heavy content and other fabulous but true stories from Inverse. Thanks for making this newsletter a part of your daily ritual.

What's New

Cult week

Culture

Is fandom a cult? The religious fervor fueling Star Wars, Marvel, and more

In mid-December 2015, Daniel Hassall sat outside his local movie theater for five hours, waiting to see a work of art that some have waited decades for.

Hassall was there that day to see The Force Awakens, the sequel to the sixth episode of Star Wars, The Return of the Jedi. He would later see Rogue One and The Last Jedi on their opening nights, too, he tells Inverse.

“It felt like such a communal bonding experience,” he recalls. “Like you had a unique relationship with that piece of art because you experienced it first with such a dedicated group of people. It reminds me of worship services, to be honest”

Being a fan means sharing a story, or even a worldview, with others. It means gathering people together to talk about the story. But some stories are so vital as to define entire civilizations, while others are trivial. If that’s true, then where does the Marvel Cinematic Universe fall? Or Star Wars? Are super-fans in some Disney-controlled cult? Ultimately, recognizing fandom as religion may be the best thing to happen to you.

Cult week

History

How one Ancient Greek thinker revolutionized math — and possibly started a cult

Most people don’t remember math class, but they do remember Pythagoras. Greek philosopher and mathematician, he is credited with one of the handiest formulae any school student could know:

A squared plus B squared equals C squared equals all right-angle triangle mysteries solved.

Intoned so often as to be drilled into your memory for years after you leave the hallowed halls of learning, it is almost like a prayer or a spell.

Pythagoras would have loved that. As with most school lessons, the devil is in the details of what your teacher did not tell you about Pythagoras. When he wasn’t writing geometry proofs, he was a cult leader whose followers believed in reincarnation, loved animals, and despised beans.

Yet 2,512 years after Pythagoras was born, we still don’t quite know what he or the Pythagoreans believed. But there are some wild theories… Let’s dive in.

Nintendo

Gaming

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom trailer hints at Hyrule's grim secrets

As part of its September 2022 Direct, Nintendo finally announced that the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is called Tears of the Kingdom. It’ll launch for Nintendo Switch on May 12, 2023.

Accompanying the release date and title reveal is a brand new trailer. While the trailer was short, it offered a number of hints about the game’s story and mechanics, giving us a clearer idea of how Tears of the Kingdom might unfold.

Nintendo says Tears of the Kingdom will “take you up into the skies and an expanded world that goes beyond that,” coinciding with the footage seen in the new trailer. At this point, we still don’t have a ton of information to work with, but we’ll find out more as we get closer to the game’s release in 2023.

Watch here

Business

Entertainment

Animators say they're "clueless" and "confused" by HBO Max cancellations

Ian Jones-Quartey was sitting at home recovering from SARS-CoV-2 when his phone suddenly started going wild.

Fans flooded the Twitter mentions of the legendary animator, who worked on Cartoon Network classics like Adventure Time and Steven Universe, decrying that the show he created, OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, would soon be removed from HBO Max. Jones-Quartey was puzzled; nobody from HBO had reached out to him about his superhero training show, which went viral on TikTok just the week prior. And none of the other shows he worked on were getting the same treatment.

“We are not sure how the show being available to people was a problem in any way,” Jones-Quartey tells Inverse.

OK K.O. was just one of 36 programs removed from HBO Max in late August, with 20 of those being children’s programming or animated.

Inverse spoke to three animators who had their shows pulled. None of them were contacted by Warner Bros. Discovery representatives before or after their show's removal, and all remained “confused” about why it even happened.

Rockets

Innovation

Blue Origin rocket suffers severe malfunction in flight

If you’re in the rocket business, be prepared for failure.

At approximately 10:27 a.m., Eastern Monday morning, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket experienced a “booster failure” a little more than a minute into its flight, according to the company.

The mission, dubbed NS-23, launched from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas, and was the 9th (and it turns out final) flight for this particular reusable BE-3 rocket engine. Thankfully, the mission was a cargo-only launch so no one was onboard when the capsule met its fiery end.

Space

Science

A private mission wants to find alien life on Venus

The last mission to enter the mysterious cloud layers of Earth’s superheated twin Venus was long enough ago that it was launched by the Soviet Union, a country that no longer exists. Vega 2 spent two days floating through the clouds in the summer of 1985, and its lander survived for 56 minutes on the unrelentingly hostile surface.

Since then, missions to Venus have remained in the comparative safety of orbit. The last American mission to visit Venus itself was the Magellan, which visited in 1989 and hung out until 1994. But that will soon change.

While NASA has plans for VERITAS and DAVINCI+ to orbit Venus and for the latter to drop a probe into its cloud layers, a privately-funded mission to Venus could chase a controversial 2020 discovery indicating microbial life in the upper cloud layers of Venus.

The Venus Life Finder Mission team, based at MIT, wants to send a small, single-instrument probe to descend through the clouds that permanently huddle over Earth’s nearest neighbor next May, according to the team’s latest mission summary.

Learn more

Meanwhile...

10 years ago this month, a groundbreaking NASA technology changed spaceflight forever

'House of the Dragon' is about to take its biggest risk yet

New Star Wars show explores the most mysterious era in franchise history

'She-Hulk' head writer reveals Madisynn's incredible origin story

Today in history: Francis Scott Key was inspired to write The Star-Spangled Banner after Fort McHenry successfully withstood a British attack on September 14, 1814.

Song of the day: "Opening Credits," nimino

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Inverse - 📜 Cult week

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