#i actually want the meta about this #i know it’s all a silly joke but i am into it
GOD YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS, you are so not alone in this at all, holy fuck. because, okay: this thing about the kenneth-is-immortal shit is that any way you slice it, it’s fascinating? like, silly joke or not, the least interesting interpretation of this is a character that has delusions of being an immortal/superhuman being, possibly an angel, whose most pressing interest is television???? WHICH IS, IN AND OF ITSELF, FASCINATING. you could do a whole thing about how and why it came to be that this person, despite believing himself to be ageless and timeless and possessed of powers without end, chooses to devote himself pretty much exclusively to tv. i would totes watch that show. i would totes read that book.
but that is the least interesting interpretation, and that’s because any other interpretation of this is an immortal/superhuman being whose most pressing interest is television. like. LIKE. i mean, seriously, think of the possibilities: kenneth is an angel trapped on earth, obsessed with television because it’s the closest he can come to observing humanity as a whole, the way he once could! kenneth is an immortal who can’t tell anyone his secret but desperately wants to be discovered, so he hangs around television sets dropping hints because he thinks it’s the most likely place for people to buy into the unbelievable! kenneth is an angel tasked with the divine duty of tracking and influencing human entertainment (and the subsequent breakdown of the bureaucracy of angels in media, and the angel who they report to, and the purpose of their presence)! kenneth is THE SPIRIT OF TELEVISION ITSELF, born when television was and forever working to keep it — and himself — alive!
but, okay, here’s my favorite one: kenneth is an immortal being who feeds on human belief. call him an angel or a god or a scavenger, because really he’s all three — he doesn’t need people to believe in him, specifically. he just needs people to believe in something, because the energy they release when they do is his lifeblood. he’s been alive since the dawn of human existence (“who said i’ve been alive forever”) and he spent centuries starving, developing a dark, hungry edge that’s never quite left him. religion sated him, but never for long; too often he found that people believed less than they said they did, and, anyway, the gods those people prayed to ate most of their energy, leaving him with almost nothing.
and then, one beautiful, brilliant day, he found television. television, created by humans who had no interest in or ability to absorb the belief thrown back at their work; television, constantly updating with new stories, new characters, new ideas for people to become completely absorbed in all the time. he works at NBC because his coworkers genuinely believe in what they do, and because they are, every day, bringing in studio audiences to fall into different storylines, different setups. he’s gone from starvation to gluttony, because now there is nothing but food all the time (but he keeps going to church, because there’s nothing with quite the same flavor as fervent religious belief). and that’s why he’s cheerful all the time, and happy to help, and completely committed to being there for tv, no matter what his position is: because at all times inside 30 rockefeller plaza, somebody is feeding him.
(via craftwitch-archive)