I recently did my fourth (?) playthrough of Lust from Beyond to pick up a few achievements and to check out the latest content update. The story in the game is one of those stories that sickens me with its tragedy yet sticks in my head for days. So today, let’s explore a rather simple question: what was Amanda Moon’s plan?
Spoilers for most of the Lust series below. I’m also not going to explain many of the terms and events – it’d be a lot to explain, so if you’re completely unversed in the backstory and lore of Lust, go play the game(s) damnit. =P We learn in Lust from Beyond that lauv’abrarc, imprisoned within Xu’thrar, continually screams for rescue. These screams are carried on Essence, and Amanda is Ac’mlale’s avatar, meaning she hears these screams more intensely and constantly than anyone else does. In fact, it seems that Amanda is the only one who hears these screams – all other Seeing Ones simply receive intense visions. Amanda’s stated goal is, accordingly, to open Xu’thrar. So far, so good. To fulfill this goal, she requires Victor, Ughro’ecna’s avatar, as only he can open Xu’thrar. Victor is a Seeing, with those visions I mentioned, and he wants them to stop. Amanda lies to Victor that Xu’thrar contains healing technology, and Victor’s Seeing visions arise from lauv’abrarc psychically calling for someone to open Xu’thrar. Logically, if Victor opens Xu’thrar, lauv’abrarc will no longer need to call out for someone to heal his realm, so Victor’s visions will cease. This lie comes back to bite Amanda and it bites her hard. At the end of the game, the Cultists of Ecstasy discover the truth behind Xu’thrar and stage a rebellion against her. Worse for her, Victor discovers the truth and, bitter about being lied to and manipulated, opposes her as well. Victor demands an explanation, to which Amanda admits that if lauv’abrarc is freed from Xu’thrar, he will transform Earth into a new Lusst’ghaa, meaning all of humanity will become mindless sex orgasmatrons forever…which gives Victor even more reason to oppose Amanda. Okay, so here’s my question: why lie about Xu’thrar? Suppose Amanda tells the truth about Xu’thrar: lauv’abrarc is imprisoned within it. Suppose she simply withholds the fact that freeing him would allow him to lust-form Earth. The Cultists wouldn’t oppose her – they worship lauv’abrarc, after all, so the mission of “hey let’s help/free the guy we worship” would elicit no reservations from anyone. Victor would open Xu’thrar without a second thought. He has no reason to oppose Amanda in this scenario, as he doesn’t feel betrayed and doesn’t know any better. Alternatively, she still tells the truth about Xu’thrar, but lies about what happens after. She claims that if they free lauv’abrarc, he’ll heal Lusst’ghaa. Is anyone really going to question the notion that the god of Lusst’ghaa can heal Lusst’ghaa if only he were freed from this prison? Without anyone questioning her, nobody would discover that freeing lauv’abrarc wouldn’t heal Lusst’ghaa but would instead imperil Earth. Again, Victor would open Xu’thrar without a second thought. So again: why does Amanda lie about Xu’thrar? Well, here’re my thoughts that are probably wrong because I’m biased and don’t want to accept the obvious answer that Amanda is probably just insane. Amanda’s relationship with the Cult of Ecstasy In short, her relationship isn’t good. The first time she encounters the Cult is at the beginning of Lust for Darkness, when its leader kidnapped and raped her. She then spent a year as the Cult’s captive sex slave. During this time, they forcefully aborted her baby and impregnated her with a new demon-baby, which they then sacrificed to open a portal into Lusst’ghaa. Around the time of Lust from Beyond: Prologue, Amanda has embraced her new persona as the Queen of Ecstasy and she returns to the Cult to lead it – by sending her third child into their midst to wreak havoc and severely injure everyone. Mabel says that the Cult fell into line under her immediately because they sensed her power. Amanda’s rule is one out of fear and initiated by force. It’s clear that Amanda doesn’t see the Cultists as her allies. This is strange, as a Cult devoted to lauv’abrarc would do everything it possibly could to free him from Xu’thrar. If Amanda’s goal is simply to free lauv’abrarc, the Cultists would be her allies. This implies that Amanda must have some goal that runs against what the Cult believes. Is Amanda concerned that the Cultists would desert if they discovered lauv’abrarc is imprisoned? That may shake their faith, as what the hell kind of god gets imprisoned? This is a strong possibility, but let’s consider: there are 2 people who seem to know the truth about Xu’thrar: Sabinian and Theodore. These two are high-ranking Cult members, so Amanda isn’t concerned with them leaving. Also, the only person Amanda technically needs on her side is Victor, and the first time they meet, Victor doesn’t worship lauv’abrarc. Amanda couldn’t possibly have been concerned about Victor’s faith wavering. She’s specifically concerned the rank-and-file Cultists would leave. But why? Why would she care about them? Keep this in mind for now. Amanda needs the Cult united, but she isn’t behind the Cult’s cause. The Nature of Universes This is a plot-important book written by Doreen Austerlitz, a terrible, terrible woman who was one of the founders of the original Cult. Honestly, she was probably a Nazi on top of things. Anyway, the book somehow has information on specific locations within Lusst’ghaa, including Xu’thrar. Amanda has Victor study the book to figure out how to open Xu’thrar, but she ripped out and hid the pages detailing Xu’thrar itself, as those pages explicitly identify it as a prison. Let’s explore that last sentence. What do those pages actually say? I tried to take a screenshot and zoom in, but I don’t think the pages have actual words (at least not English ones). I think I saw the words TERRA and PENINSULA, except PENINSULA was spelled wrong? Anyway. At the end of the game, Mabel convinces the Shackleys to raid Amanda’s room. They do so and find the ripped-out pages. Its information was enough to drive them to rebellion. Mabel tells Victor to find and read the pages. Upon doing so, Victor’s dialogue is, “Xu’thrar heals nothing. Xu’thrar is a prison!” But later, when he confronts Amanda, he asks her what will happen if Xu’thrar opens. This means that the pages don’t actually say that lauv’abrarc is imprisoned in Xu’thrar – all they say is that Xu’thrar is a prison. If it explained that lauv’abrarc is imprisoned in Xu’thrar and that lauv’abrarc would lust-form Earth upon his freedom, Victor wouldn’t need to ask Amanda that question. Here’s Mabel’s dialogue on Xu’thrar and the missing pages: “Xu’thrar…it’s horrible…we can’t let it be opened!” First, this doesn’t say what exactly is inside Xu’thrar. Second, this implies she doesn’t know it’s lauv’abrarc. She’s a Cultist of Ecstasy. She worships lauv’abrarc. Her fellow Cultists worship lauv’abrarc. None of them would characterize him as “horrible.” The only way they’d fear him getting free is if they knew what lauv’abrarc would do once free, but if that were true, logically they would know it because they read it in the pages, which means Victor would have gleaned the same information from those pages, meaning he wouldn’t have needed to ask Amanda what would happen if lauv’abrarc gets free. This all implies that the Cultists rebel because they realized Amanda was lying to them, not because they realized lauv’abrarc himself was imprisoned in Xu’thrar. Mabel likely concluded that because Xu’thrar is a prison – a rather maximum-security one, at that – something horrible is inside and therefore it can’t be let loose. At this point Amanda’s attacked the Cultists twice, with horrific consequences, so Mabel simply concluding that Amanda wants to release some unknown eldritch horror makes a lot of sense. There’s one final piece of evidence that points to the pages saying nothing about what’s actually inside Xu’thrar. The Cult of Ecstasy at the time of Lust for Darkness had free access to the book. In particular, Willard would very likely have read it, given that Doreen wrote it and Doreen specifically groomed Willard to succeed her as the leader of the Cult. Willard, however, made exactly zero effort to free lauv’abrarc from jail. Read: the leader of the Cult that worships lauv’abrarc and the avatar of lauv’abrarc himself did nothing to free lauv’abrarc from jail. In fact, Amanda says in Lust from Beyond that Willard’s goal was just to reach Lusst’ghaa. He understood nothing else. The only way this makes sense is if The Nature of Universes doesn’t include any information on lauv’abrarc’s imprisonment. Willard didn’t try to free him because he simply didn’t know. Amanda’s attempt to open Xu’thrar At the end of the game, Amanda takes the Mask of Ughro’ecna, the key needed to open Xu’thrar, and goes to Xu’thrar alone. This seems to make exactly no sense. Amanda knows that Victor, being Ughro’ecna’s avatar, is the only one who can open Xu’thrar. This means she must know that she can’t open Xu’thrar. It also means that leaving Victor in the mansion full of rebelling Cultists is nonsensical – if one of them killed him for being in league with Amanda, she’d lose everything. But she tried anyway. Why? This isn’t in the original game – it got patched in later because it wasn’t finished at first, but Amanda has sex with Victor right before he goes to get the Mask. We know that Amanda can absorb Seeing powers through sex – she did exactly that to at least 2 Seeing Ones prior to this. What if Amanda tried to absorb Victor’s Seeing powers, hoping that would transfer the avatar-ship to her, so she could open Xu’thrar herself? It would explain why she thought there were any way in hell she could open Xu’thrar despite establishing time and again that she knows Victor is the only one who can. But that then begs the question: why try to open Xu’thrar herself? Amanda’s relationship with lauv’abrarc This one seems simple – she worships him, right? He’s the god of lust. I don’t think so. This guy has been screaming in her head since she was a child. A Cult dedicated to him absolutely destroyed her life. They imprisoned and raped her. They murdered her unborn child and forced her to give birth to a demon-baby (that they sacrificed). Her time there ensured that even when she tried to put it behind her, she couldn’t – her libido, fueled by lauv’abrarc’s influence, proved too much for her and she ended up (1) sacrificing her third child, breaking her husband’s heart; (2) breaking her husband’s mind; and (3) returning to the very Cult that wrecked her life. I humbly propose that interpreting Amanda as wanting dire and brutal vengeance for all of this isn’t that far out of line. It would explain why she wanted the Cult united. Right at the winter solstice, at the end of the game, she invites all current and former Cultists to a grand gathering at the mansion. When her child attacks the mansion, anyone who’d ever followed the Cult’s tenets was all there, conveniently in one place to get butchered. If people had steadily deserted beforehand, this wouldn’t have worked. It explains how Amanda would see the Cult’s goals as opposed to hers, even if the Cult endeavored to free lauv’abrarc. If the Cult had done so, someone might’ve succeeded – and Amanda doesn’t want that. She wanted to free him herself – to kill him and exact revenge for him wrecking her life. This also explains why she wanted to open Xu’thrar herself rather than have Victor do it. That part didn’t work, but it explains why she tried. Note that when Victor is exploring the mansion in the aftermath of Amanda’s wrath, he finds the statue of lauv’abrarc shattered. Who shattered it? Remember, the Cultists worship him. We’ve established that they don’t know that he’s the one imprisoned in Xu’thrar. They don’t know what he’ll do if he gets free. Exactly nobody would have reason to defile his shrine. Except Amanda. Finally, why does Amanda absorb Seeing powers prior to Victor? Amanda says she did it to “countless” Seeing Ones. If Amanda just wants to free lauv’abrarc to turn humans into perpetual cum fountains, there would be no point in bolstering her own power. But if she were planning to destroy lauv’abrarc, it stands to reason that she’d need to power up and power up drastically. Putting it all together Thinking through this way, we paint a picture of a broken, vengeful woman who desperately wants the screaming in her head to stop and the source of that screaming dead for what it did to her. Her plot would thus progress as so: 1994: Amanda Moon is born. She receives horrifying, incomprehensible visions throughout her childhood and adulthood, but tries to live a normal life. 2017: The Cult of Ecstasy kidnaps Amanda. 2018: Jonathan rescues Amanda. 2019: Amanda succumbs to her frustrated hyper-libido and opens her own portal to Lusst’ghaa. She and Jonathan spend a year there. This is where I think Amanda first concocted her plan. Between 2018 and 2019, Amanda tried to live a normal life and push all the Cult experiences behind her. But lauv’abrarc’s screams continued. Her experiences likely made her even more sensitive to his voice. Her heightened libido proved too much for her and she broke Jonathan’s mind with sex and sacrificed her third child to Lusst’ghaa. She spent the better part of a year having wild sex in Lusst’ghaa, satiating her frustrated libido. Once it died down, Amanda was able to think more rationally again, and was horrified at what she’d become. Amanda would write, much later, that when she saw how Jonathan reacted to their child – mutated and monstrous from Lusst’ghaa’s influence – she felt extreme guilt and wondered to herself whether sexual bliss really were worth it. Jonathan was so happy when she became pregnant. That’s not something sexual ecstasy could ever replicate. Amanda sees only one way forward: embrace lust and use it against her enemies. At this point is where she becomes Ac’mlale’s avatar. She uses her command of Essence to call out to Seeing Ones. She lures them to Lusst’ghaa and takes their powers through sex before having her child murder them. Maybe she thought killing them would free them from their Seeing curse. Maybe she just didn’t want loose ends. On the summer solstice of 2020, Amanda sends her child to Sabinian’s mansion in the events of Lust from Beyond: Prologue. Christopher becomes the latest addition to her body count and she appears at the mansion to assume command of the Cult. On the summer solstice of 2021, Amanda discovers that Victor is Ughro’ecna’s avatar. She secretly has Jonathan kill Lily, driving Victor into despair, making him easy prey for her to recruit into the Cult. Victor spends the next 6 months serving Amanda, studying how to open Xu’thrar. On the winter solstice of 2021, Victor discovers how to get the Mask of Ughro’ecna. Amanda senses her plans are finally going to come to fruition, so she has sex with Victor and takes his powers, leaving him just enough to get the Mask. While he’s gone, the Cultists discover Amanda’s lies and rebel against her. But only then, in the end, did they understand the true extent of the Queen’s wrath. Amanda summons her child into the mansion and massacres the Cultists…which she was going to do anyway. She recovers the Mask from the Shackleys (before brutally decapitating one of them) and finds Victor unconscious on the floor of her room. She ignores him and goes to Xu’thrar herself, but to her dismay, the door doesn’t open. Victor then appears and reveals that he has turned against her. Confronted with the possibility that all her schemes were falling apart right when she was about to claim victory, Amanda goes into a furious frenzy – fully succumbing to her Queen of Ecstasy persona – and attacks Victor. Victor fights back, but is ultimately unable to harm her. Amanda manages to control her rage and plays her last card: she will use Victor’s lust against him. Victor succumbs to his lust and has sex with Amanda, surrendering to her. He then dons the Mask of Ughro’ecna and opens Xu’thrar while Amanda and her child watch. This is where the game ends. In my head-canon, Amanda then surprises Victor by having her child subdue him while she declares that lauv’abrarc’s time is at an end. Amanda exacts her final revenge, destroying lauv’abrarc and taking his powers the same way she took the Seeing powers from before. And here’s where things get interesting for me. Amanda’s spent her entire life buffeted around by alien forces way the hell above her pay grade. Now, for the first time, she’s free and the one in command of those forces, having ascended the mantle of Lustful God(dess). What will she do? What does a newly apotheosed human do? …I have an entire crossover head-canon that answers that, but I’m not going to write all of that here. Thanks for reading! Comments are closed.
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