I Know Some People Are Worried About Iron Lung And Mark Because Of The Strike, But You Don't Need To

I know some people are worried about Iron Lung and Mark because of the strike, but you don't need to be. Mark is a union member, doing a union movie, he's not crossing the picket line.

To cross the picket line would mean working with any of the four companies the union is striking against. Mark's movie has no affiliation with Disney, Netflix, Amazon, or Warner Bros. The cast is safe, he's safe, the movie is safe.

Unless, for any odd reason, he pays any of these companies, or gets his movie tangled up in them, then he would be in trouble, but he is not going to do that.

With post production almost done, he's fine, he is out of the bigger struggles, and he has no reason to interact with any of those companies. Most of those companies are so big because they fund people's ideas and projects so that they can actually be made rather than struggling with self funding. Mark and his team never needed them because he's funding the movie, and doing the work to get advertising and marketing finalized, and he's not doing any of that through those companies.

He owns the movie, he paid for the movie, he wrote the movie script, he's the main actor in the movie. Even when he pays for scheduling and buying spots in theaters, he still won't be working with the big four, he'll be competing against them as an independent movie.

He's pro union, he's fine. It's how he did in space, and maybe even heist. At the moment, he's basically functioning as a small creative company, and one that's probably better for his workers, and paying them better than those who are marching with their picket signs. Crossing the line would be actually having to cross those people to get to the big four, and he's not involved with Hollywood, he isn't in that world, he sits beside it.

Now the edge of sleep, that might be a different story. I don't think Mark is allowed to talk about the show already since he hasn't talked about it much so far. He did leak some on stream once, and was kinda stressed about it, but it turned out alright. He doesn't talk about the show at all so he's probably under contract. I don't know how the strike will affect it since it's probably going on streaming (Netflix), and if it's already ready to go and waiting on a time slot then Mark will have to be unaffiliated with the rest of the project. He won't be able to talk about it at all, no promotion of it. If it changes platforms to something else like, HBO, Hulu, or Peacock then maybe it'll be fine (unless those are under any of the four, and I don't honestly know if they are.)

The Pixar Youtube theory, Part 1: Escape with Markiplier

Hello! The first two I would like to tackle are the With Markiplier series and Escape the Night, and hopefully, next, I can tackle Iris and Sander's sides, talk about Dad Feels and Genloss, try and cross the talking points between them, and at the end I’ll make a post on how they’re all connected and what I think the timeline would be.

Note: I don’t know everything, this is just a theory, tell me if I’m wrong or if you like it!

Let's start with something big;

The Pixar Youtube Theory, Part 1: Escape With Markiplier

The houses. In Escape the Night season One, Two, and (arguably) Four are set in houses. In the first season, they contained the evil, trapped in the 1920s, but it sunk its way into Joey. In the second season, they broke a seal to allow them to leave the house, stuck in the Victorian era, and Joey dies and is revived by the crown of oblivion. And the fourth season is the afterlife. Or, I guess, an afterlife, set in a museum, where Joey decides to open Pandora’s box and gets trapped inside.

Now let's look at Markiplier Manor. It is Mark’s estate that he grew up in that has spirits and evil living in the house. Every time he dies, he comes back and gets closer to the entity. The entity then helps him come up with a plan to kill all his friends because the entity wants to leave the house.

Right off the bat, just looking at these two series, we see some obvious similarities. House is evil, has weird spirits roaming inside of it, and makes the people who own it murder their friends. And nobody leaves the house the same. They are still affected by this magic when they leave whether they’d like to admit it or not. Remember this, I’ll come back to it.

Every single time someone new is invited to the chaos, it always comes in a little invitation. Whether written by him or by someone pretending to be him, it always comes in a letter. And what do we get before ‘Who Killed Markiplier’ came out?

Exactly.

Evil house, invitation, good people turning into bad people, and death. In Joey's, there is a lot more beating around the bush, but it gives us a lot of information on how the world works. This leads me to my next point.

The idea of time not being linear, hoping through universes, and getting stuck in loops over and over again. Their dimension-hopping and teleporting back and forth between time all comes... from stones. In Mark’s Space series, you, as the player, replay events, restart over and over again, teleport to different times, and teleport to different universes. And it's all thanks to the warp crystal, this little, blue, glowing crystal tower. It was also used to power the warp core, which caused time loops and paradoxes, and the warp device, which allowed teleportation to different universes.

And now let's look at Escape the Night. Specifically, at the very end of season four, where Bretman and Colleen used ‘The cosmic sphere’ to open a portal and escape purgatory. And what is in the center of this device?

A little blue crystal tower.

This. This one little detail is huge! They look the exact same, they do the exact same things, and they both need to be attached to something to be used properly. And, when attached to something different, it does something different. When attached to the box in Heist, it gives you whatever item you want or need, assuming it takes it from a different time or universe. When attached to the warp core, it's supposed to cause the ship to warp to where it needs to go but caused a time loop in the process. When attached to the warp device, it teleports you to random points across the multiverse. All of the devices work, but it acts erratically and unreliably. But when attached to the cosmic sphere, it projects a portal that you can then walk through. No weirdness, no unpredictability, just exactly where they needed to go.

(My working theory is that the warp crystal needs to be in the cosmic sphere to work properly. If it isn’t, it will be unpredictable.)

The crystal was taken from the afterlife, purgatory. A place completely identical to this one, but slightly different. Darker, scarier, a place filled with spirits and evil, Dark entities.

Kinda sounds like Mark’s upside-down, don’t you think?

But the real question is which one comes first? Well, let's look at what time period each ETN season came from. The events of what happened in the show are linear to how they come out, but the dates of what happens change the timeline completely. Season 2 was the Victorian era, which was between 1837 to 1901. Season 1 was in the 1920s, very cut and dry. And season four was mainly set in the 1940s, but can go completely across time. We know this from the things collected from the different time periods. (Irrelevant for this post, but season three is set in the 1970s.)

And Who Killed Markiplier, according to Google, is set somewhere between the 1920s and the 1950s, meaning the order of events would’ve been S2, S1, WKM, S4, S3. God damn time fuckery, making my job hard.

In season one, the original manor, they ‘contained’ the evil, meaning it couldn’t leave the house. Or we thought it couldn’t leave the house until we see Joey leave the house being corrupted by this evil. Meaning that the evil needs to inhabit someone so it can bring others in. The longer in the house, the worse the effects get. The same thing with Mark’s manor. Two, unnamed, evil entities leave the house through both Celine’s body and your body.

What I’m trying to imply is that, maybe, Mark’s manor is the same house in ETN season 1. “But Devon,” I hear you asking, “How does that make sense? Mark would have to have owned the house at the same time as Joey for that to make sense, considering Mark grew up in the house and Joey ‘inherits’ it at the very beginning.” And to that, I say, “Consider the pockets of time.”

If Joey exists in this pocket of time and then leaves to go back to the modern world, that means the person that owns the house no longer exists. At least, not at that time. Mark was 28 when he made ‘Who Killed Markiplier,’ Meaning he lived in his own place for a while. Since Mark grew up in that time and that house, and since Joey abandoned that house in the 1920s, that means the exact events that happened in that house happened around 1948 at least, which puts us squarely in our timeline.

If Mark’s Manor and Joey’s estate are the same, then that means that the evil and the entities are the same beings. Just like how the warp crystal and the cosmic sphere are the same stone. However, I would like to add one last thing.

Cc! Mark has said that the entities not only trick C! Mark into doing their bidding but also convince Mark that it was his idea the whole time. That idea was to have Wilford kill him in a game of Russian Roulette, have everyone turn on him and kill him as well, and then him and the entity could take his body and get out of there. And I’ve noticed that death description fits two deaths in escape the night season one.

The death of Timmothy DeLaGetto, also known as ‘The Mobster.’

And the death of Arthur.

For those who don’t know, Arthur’s entire role was to manipulate the evil to do what he wants. He was ‘The butler’ of the house, convincing all of the other past owners to feed into the evil so he can do what he wants. It feels like he’s not just working as a butler for the owner, but a butler for the evil. He gets found out, the remaining guests free his brother, the brother then shoots the other two residents of the house along with Arthur.

If I were to guess, Arthur doesn’t like being dead. So after Joey leaves, the bodies get cleaned up, Mark and his family move in, and Arthur is forced to watch Mark, Damien, and William grow up in front of him. Arthur gets replaced with Benjamin, Mark falls in love with Celine, Celine after realizing the house is evil (Because she’s a seer) leaves the house and runs away with William, Damien becomes Mayor, Mark feels worthless and alone and kills himself.

Arthur talks to Mark, Arthur convinces the evil to bring him back, Mark comes back, Mark kills himself, so on and so forth. The entity that works with Mark being Arthur makes sense. He would know that killing Wilford like that would work because he’s seen it work. Once with the mobster and once with him. All he did was combine the two and convince Mark he came up with it.

When Celine comes into the picture, he’s ecstatic because he gets the chance to not just get his own body, but a more powerful body. A body that could do what his and Wilford’s couldn’t. Talk to the beyond and commune with other entities. So he changed the plan and had Mark kick out Celine and Damien from their bodies, forcing them to take yours when they die. But not without taking some evil on their way out.

But, of course, this is just the beginning. This isn’t the last time we see the evil. The evil spreads, and my god does it spread.

(Author’s Note: Joey needs better friends both in and out of canon.)