Roots of Dread Character Lore
Once again, with the new chapter comes new lore. Sadly, I find Haddie's lore kind of disappointing, since it basically ignores 90% of what happened in the Archives, but it is what it is. The Dredge is cool.
Haddie Kaur
Haddie spent her youth in a household brimming with love. Her mother, Professor Basant Kaur, moved across the world to teach agricultural science at a university in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Her father, Rajan Singh, found remarkable success with a catering business in the small Quebecoise town. Her house was constantly swirled with the wonderful aromas of cumin, chillies, masala, cardamon and fresh, steaming naan pulled from a tandoor oven. Her earliest memories were filled with stories of India and on her tenth birthday her parents promised to visit Punjab just after the new year.
During the holiday season, her parents went to a party with their closest friends, Marise and Francois Rois. When Haddie called her parents to say she felt sick, they left in a hurry. Driving through the winding, snow-swept roads of rural Quebec, Rajan lost control of the car, skidding into an icy, gnarled forest. It would be two days before their bodies were found trapped in the vehicle. As Haddie’s fever broke, the police arrived at her doorstep telling her that they had not suffered. But Haddie was old enough to know the police were just being kind. The next morning, she woke up with white hair and a question that would haunt her for the rest of her life.
The Rois took Haddie in, doing their best to fill the hole left by her parents. Despite the enormous loss, Haddie was again surrounded with love: the love her adoptive parents had for their son, Jordan, and the love the three had for her. But the trauma of losing her parents seemed to unlock something within her. She began to see things nobody else could see; horrible, unnatural, unexplainable things. Apparitions tormented her in class, at home, in bed. Her unexpected screams earned her the nickname “Helly Haddie,” adding to her alienation and anguish. Once a cheerful and social child, Haddie walled herself off to the world.
With time Haddie realized her uncanny abilities only triggered in certain areas–dark areas. It was as though there were places in the world where another dimension somehow bled into our own. Jordan called these intersecting areas Overlaps and they seemed to give Haddie insight into a dark, shadowy world straight out of a cosmic horror story. When Haddie graduated from high school, she felt an unexplainable tug to discover who her parents were. To raise money for a trip to India, her brother Jordan suggested that they use her abilities to explore and document all the haunted places in Quebec, starting with a haunted asylum. At the Dorea Institute, Haddie could see and hear residual memories… patients, doctors, and so much more.
While recording her impressions at the institute, she offhandedly called the encroaching dimension the Ravage since it not only assaulted her with memories from all times and places but also gave the sense of feeding off psychic energy. The Ravage, she sensed, was a living mosaic of human suffering that was slowly corrupting and devouring the world. She concluded that they needed to investigate more to see if there was anything to her hypothesis.
Jordan presented the footage and recordings to their uncle Stefan who helped them turn what they had documented into a web series. Within days of uploading the first episode, Ravages of the Abyss was a viral hit. True crime fans, ghost-chasers and skeptics flooded the comments with their own theories of what she was experiencing. Stefan handled the production, and before long, he presented Haddie with her first check as a professional podcaster.
Now with a working budget, Haddie was able to investigate the most haunted places in the world seeking answers about the Ravage. Her investigations led her to a secluded island where an entire town had mysteriously disappeared, leaving dozens of empty homes. She never felt such a strong influence of the Ravage as she did here. It pulsed with suffering and cruelty and repressed darkness.
Haddie absorbed the emotions of the ghost town and closed her eyes. Calming herself and silencing her mind, she began to hear guttural screams and cries and whimpers. When she opened her eyes again, she could see the scintillating orange residual memories of people tearing each other apart in the mud and rain. Then everything disappeared as a much older version of her stepbrother beckoned her from one of the homes. She chased after him only to stop suddenly with the realization that the Ravage was toying with her emotions, playing tricks on her, making her see things that couldn’t possibly be real.
The encounter nearly put Haddie off the project entirely, but she was now the linchpin for a company that fed her family. Her uncle Stefan continued to line up sites to visit, and after a personal trip backpacking across India, Haddie carried on subjecting herself to the horrors of the Ravage.
Then, while investigating a haunted World War II bunker in the Alps, Haddie heard someone faintly crying out for help in Punjabi. Snow flurried in the bunker as a tunnel suddenly opened to a snow-covered forest. A horn blared in the distance and faded away. She saw the glow of red lights through a wall of snow and felt her heart skip a beat as she rushed to a crumpled blue car pinned between two massive pine trees. Through the shattered windshield she saw the bodies of her parents stuck in pools of frozen blood.
Haddie narrowed her gaze and saw tiny plumes of vapor floating from their trembling blue lips. With a profound sense of urgency, she rushed around the wreck trying her best to push, pull and kick her way in. All to no avail. As she cried out to them that she was sorry for being sick, that the accident was all her fault, their eyes snapped open and, in unison, they answered the question that had anchored her life to their death.
Yes… Beti… we suffered…
With a terrible cry Haddie fell back into the snow as ice tendrils wrapped around her and pulled her down into a world of endless darkness.
The Dredge/Druanee
The Fold was founded on a private American island in the 1960s by a group of anonymous philanthropists. Their goal was to establish a peaceful society free of dark thoughts and emotions, attracting the dismayed, disenchanted and disillusioned from all over the country.
This peace-loving community thrived over the years, and members followed the dictates of its charismatic leader Otto Stamper, who taught his followers the secrets of maintaining happiness through joy-talk, meditation and the endless reciting of “good-thinking” mantras.
But not all was bliss within the Fold, and Otto swiftly banished anyone who confessed to having dark thoughts or speaking dark words. Those he appointed as guardians of the Fold were quick to root out malcontents, banishing anyone who thought or spoke against the almost perfect community he had established.
In this way, Otto had conditioned Ottomarians to believe dark thoughts were the root of all discontent. He spoke of an ancient dark god called Druanee, telling them how this god fed on dark memories and desires and how they needed to expel any and all manifestations of darkness from their hearts for fear of summoning this horror from the Land of Shadows.
Life was more or less a Utopian dream on the island until, that is, the darkness began to slowly leak through the cracks of their spiritual dam and members began to mysteriously disappear.
It wasn’t long before fear closed its septic jaws on the island and refused to let go.
The once happy community now gathered in a few homes chanting all the “good-thinking” mantras in a desperate attempt to rid their lives of this formless creature that seemed to stalk them in the shadows and consume them in their sleep.
Otto tried to quell his followers, telling them that there were malcontents among their ranks and that they alone had summoned the Druanee to their Garden of Joy.
As the Fold bleated fear, Otto evoked desperate measures. Ottomarians were restricted to their homes to prevent the spread of rumors and dark-talk while sleep was forbidden to prevent anyone from releasing dark dreams into the world. Freedom and sleep would return just as soon as the Druanee was no longer upon them.
But when Ottomarians continued to disappear, Otto assembled his followers near the beach where he placed a screaming woman on a wooden stage. There, in the rain, Otto explained to his drenched, alienated and sleep-deprived congregation that the woman was a journalist here to destroy everything they had created.
As the guardians held the trembling woman, she screamed that Otto wasn’t the savior he claimed to be. He belonged to an ancient cult, an exclusive club of billionaires that took pleasure in corrupting and sacrificing people, towns and even countries to an Elder God. The journalist told them Otto hadn’t banished anyone! He had tortured and sacrificed them and that they would all be next.
Without hesitation, Otto slit her throat before she could continue to spread lies. As she collapsed to her knees with her hands clasped around her neck, he told his confused and terrified herd that she was working with others within their ranks and that they needed to find the imposters before the Druanee came for them all.
Otto’s words shot over the congregation and reached into the murky recesses of their hearts and dredged up dark and fearful things.
Years of suppressed emotions began to bubble up as a thick fog pushed through restless legs and feet. Whispers began, and the whispers became panicked mantras, and the mantras became screams and curses as each member accused the next of malthinking and malspeaking.
Over the howling wind and pounding rain, the screams and curses grew louder as everyone desperately tried to contain the darkness within. But the harder they tried, the quicker they failed, and within moments the dam burst to release a torrent of hell.
Otto watched his once blissful and joyful herd suddenly erupt into violence unlike anything he had ever seen before. The Fold bleated accusations and tore each other to bits and pieces with hands and teeth and never once did they look up to see their kind and charismatic shepherd smiling down upon them with eyes that were cold, bleak and without pity.
When it was all over, Otto felt the creaking wooden stage shake as a murder of crows circled above. Suddenly, the ground rose and then sank into a thick, oozing black mud like molasses. Moments later, a formless mass squelched out of the muck and rose like a rearing horse to feed upon the writhing mass of butchered humanity.
It was everywhere and nowhere at once as it slowly picked its way through the carnage, absorbing the darkness, savoring the misery, trailing terrible noises. Shrieks. Cries. Whimpers. Pops. Cracks.
Feasting sounds.
Death sounds.
Dark sounds.
Otto watched the creature as it slowly began to manifest into the very thing he had imagined–the very thing he had made them all imagine.
It turned slowly to look at Otto for a long, silent moment, then the Druanee trudged away through the thick black sludge, disappearing into the shadows from which it had come.
Comments
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I really, really, really, really dislike the direction for both of these characters. Squandered potential in my book.
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Because tome Haddie and Survivor Haddie are not the same person, even the Observer commented on this stating that there are multiple versions of the Haddie and Jordan stories, with some of the version being inspired by other versions of Haddie and Jordan aswell as their podcasts being called Harbinger of Hell in one version and in another calling it ravages of the abyss, along with some other difference such as how the fate of Haddie's parents differs from each versions
Personally i really like both and i think they did a great job on the lore.
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I kinda feel like its out of place in DbD lore for Otto to get off without being consumed.
The entity and other beings like it have always been shown as Chaotic Evil and all consuming so its rather out of place for Otto to be let go.
I mean look at what happened with the plague. Near identical set up but still consumed with a "Good" outcome for her but consumed all the same.
Plus if its something else that isn't chaotic it doesn't explain why the Dredge would work for the inherently chaotic Entity(Order vs Chaos).
It goes even further with the Entity also consuming emotions and using trails to force emotions(Primarily Hope a positive one) out which is the opposite of how the Dredge is implied to work by devouring suppressed emotions/Murderous thoughts.
I am just really confused my the Dredge.
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Yeah, that didn't really occur to me until the wiki mentioned that. I think part of that comes from how I (and a lot of the community) really don't like the whole multiverse concept they have (or at least how it's currently presented), so it doesn't usually cross my mind. With the multiverse in mind, it makes a bit more sense, I would have just preferred seeing the Archive's Haddie over this imposter.
Actually, this is them being consistent for once. Otto still needs to alive for him to be killed by Doctor. And for the Dredge, what better to hunt down and feed on hope than the literal embodiment of negativity once held back by that very hope.
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Fair enough i suppose, personally though i love the whole multiverse stuff, it's what makes DBD's lore interesting and while i know there are people in the community who doesn't like it, there also is quite alot of people in the community aswell who does like it.
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