Do I hear death from above? Death from below? Death from any way under the sun? It must be part II in our ongoing series, Better Know a Papa.
Papa Moloch, The Fightin’ Moloch! Joining the RRF in June 2007, Moloch quickly rocketed up the ranks of the horde, impressing Goolina with his organizational skills and tactical acumen, and then the rest of the War Council after his skills and acumen were punished with a promotion. His focused strategic vision and brutal effectiveness made him an obvious choice for successor after the personality-driven reign of Papa Murray. Since becoming Papa in November 2007, the RRF has been neigh unstoppable. We recently had a chance to sit down with Papa Moloch, here’s what he had to say.
MH&S: You’re a Gore Corps member through and through. So I guess my first question is, what’s the most memorable time you’ve been eaten by a member of the horde?
Moloch: I can only remember one instance of being eaten by a member of the horde, which came when I went to the SSZ conquest party in Breddy Park. I posted an alert on the DoHS forum to say that I was waiting in the park for someone to zombify me, but also specifically banning members of the War Council from doing it, so that needy young zambahs could get a free meal.
Who took all the fun and feeding?
Zoey Zarg and Murray Jay Suskind.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
MH&S: I just took a bite out of you, got you nice and infected. Marinating for the horde. It was Zoey who couldn’t resist eating you.
Moloch: It’s the power. It has that effect on the ladies. I mean Hell, it happened to you too right? Goolina took your wang all the way to Buttonville.
MH&S: I’m still waiting for it back, to. It’s a horrible way to abuse my rotting carcass. Anyway, who do you think was the Queen of Alternative Rock: Kim Gordon or Kim Deal?
Moloch: There are women musicians now? Come on! Seriously?
OK, I’ll humour you. I’ll go with whichever one is most attractive.
MH&S: So you’re choosing the more experimental noise rock mileu of the Sonic Youth over the underappreciated but wildly influential “loud-quiet-loud” dynamic of the Pixies?
Moloch: Actually, I’m going to go with Melissa Auf Der Maur. I’d plough that all day, every day.
MH&S: I’d say that’s a disturbing image, but like most people, I have no clue what you look like… speaking of which, you’re infamous for your refusal to be photographed. This leads to me wonder… are you, in reality, the prophet Mohamed?
Moloch: ه] مرحبا, حسن أنا حاسوبك. أراد أنت يحبّ [كب وف تا]? أنا كنت صحيحة يجعل واحدة. أنا منشار أنّ [بروك] إلى الخلف جبل الأخرى يوم. بجدّيّة, ماذا ال [فوك] كان [ألّ ث] هرج و مرج حول. راعي بقر ر? هو كان يستعصي أن يجد مستقيمة واحدة, أنا يقدّم.
Translation: No.
MH&S: Does Team America know that you’re a terrorist, sir?
Moloch: Please! Every fool knows that Zoey Zarg and Gus Thomas did 9/11. I was set up! Everyone always blames the Gore Corps.
MH&S: After that outburst, I can see why. Shifting gears for a moment, the RRF has been nigh unstoppable since you’ve become Papa. What do you ascribe this to?
Moloch: My genius! But seriously, we’ve had a lot of good things come together at once. We’ve had an influx of enthusiastic new metagamers come into the horde, which has resulted in our having a brand new strike team, Team America. When I took over, one of the first things that I did was put in place the Suskind Act, 2007, which guaranteed all strike teams immunity from ‘Murray-Jaying’, which is the cause of 97.3% of known strike team dissolutions. Team America were the first beneficiaries of this and they’ve helped a lot of our new zombies level up very quickly.
Another change is that we are far more cautious in our target selection now. Not to give away our operational secrets, but when we attack a location now we do so in the all-but certain knowledge that it will fall. We’ve also consolidated the horde into a single main group, as opposed to the endless sub-groups that have been used in the past. This simplifies the logistical processes of deploying a large horde.
There are other reasons, but I’d say that those are the main ones. Especially the one about my genius.
MH&S: I’ll have you know that I was in on the ground floor of AU10. So that gives me a 1/4 success rate on starting up strike teams. That’s a .250 average. Above the Mendoza line. That and I named Team America, so it’s only a matter of time before they collapse.
Moloch: That counts as a confession of strike team murder. You’re the Son of Sam of strike teams. Actually, more like the Jeffrey Dahmer. Don’t pretend that you don’t know why…
MH&S: Please, Dahmer was a breather until he got that broomstick upside his head. If anything, he’d have been a Gore Corpser. Now, you’re clearly named after the Mortal Kombat character Moloch. Did your parents not like you very much?
Moloch: There’s a story there.
Mum and Dad always had high hopes for me. Well, expectations really. Dad was evil, Mum was evil. They wanted me to be evil too, so they gave me the name of the ancient Phoenician God, Moloch, mostly because he is associated with infant sacrifices. Big stuff to live up to, right? Well, they put their money where their mouths are and sent me to the best schools that blood money can buy. Eventually I graduated with a first from Oxford, which is the UK’s leading centre for evil education, and they really felt that I was in a great position to do real evil in this world. Me? Well, I just wanted to concentrate on my music.
Mum had always wanted me to become a doctor, like House, the Chief of Staff from Scrubs,or Mengele. Dad was more ambitious though. He dreamed of my becoming the next Stalin or Pol Pot, maybe even a Karl Rove! Yeah, that’s pressure for you. So, the summer after I graduated he arranged for me to go to the States and really begin my evil training, with a year’s paid internship at Disney Corp.
It started off OK but, over time, between the filing, the coffee-making and the feeding Bob Iger the still-beating hearts of virgins, it really started to get me down. After a couple of months I looked around and thought ‘Moloch, this is LA! Where better to make a go of it with music?’ So one day I just upped and quit. I knew what Mum and Dad would say, but this is my life and I need to do what’s best for me. I decided not to call them. I mean, why worry them, right?
That said, I didn’t abandon evil altogether. I formed a folk-alt-death metal band called ‘The Heart of Corporate America’ and at night I would work on my songs, but by day I was working for Blockbuster Video, editing the good bits out of films and adding subliminal pro-Bush propaganda. Hey, a guy’s got to eat. We recorded a demo, and if you play it backwards it tells you to go out and kill children and shit. Y’know, good, old-fashioned, healthy rock music. I figured, yeah, sure, I wasn’t doing really big evil and Mum and Dad would be hurt by that, but if I could just show them that music and evil could be one, maybe then they could accept that this was who I was.
We put the demo in all the right hands and we played as many shows as we could. We slept on friends’ floors, in our van, anywhere we could really. Anything to help get the word out there. We thought we’d got the evil music thing down pat. Then the Pussycat Dolls broke through and we realised that we were just amateurs. We were doing songs about torture, rape, Starbucks, 4Chan, but really, how can you go toe-to-toe with real evil like the Dolls and all that American Idol stuff?
Those were the bad times. I started hitting the bottle pretty hard and the junk wasn’t really recreational any more, no matter how many times I told myself it was. The band split up and I was just kind of lost. After a couple of months all I really wanted to do was go home, but I couldn’t call my parents. Seriously, how could I tell them that I had failed; not just at evil or music, but at life? I got a loan from my Uncle and caught a plane back to Britain.
When I got back into town I got in touch with an old girlfriend. She’d moved cities, but she was happy for me to come and crash at her place for a few weeks while I got myself straightened out, so I took my guitar and my suitcase and hopped on a bus to her new town. Malton. The rest, as they say, is history.
After I became Papa of the RRF I called my parents to tell them. I said ‘Mahm! Zahz! Ahv maIz Iz. Ahm r!ahl !vahr nah’. Dad tried to sound pleased for me, but you could just tell his heart wasn’t in it. And Mum? She just cried.
We haven’t really talked since that day.
MH&S: Okay, but what about the Mortal Kombat?
Moloch: It’s Street Fighter II for arseholes.
MH&S: I see. What part of the harman body, besides the brainz, do you feel are the most nutritious?
Moloch: If you can get a pregnant woman you’ll find the foetus to be seriously packed with nutrients.
What? Dude, what the fuck are you staring at?
MH&S: …
Moloch: Come on! The bones are still soft, so they are really crunchy, but still edible.
MH&S: I’ll just move on to the next question… you’ve played pretty much every side of this game in survivor, zombie, death cultist and PKer. Which do you find the most rewarding?
Moloch: Death-culting work is the most fun for me because it presents the most tactical flexibility. That and it makes me pretty much unstoppable. Shot? I’ll take out your barricades. Combat revived? Oh boy, you guys are fucked now, etc.
MH&S: Alright, final question, Papa Moloch: Great Papa or Greatest Papa?
Moloch: Great Papa. No-one has surpassed Petro.
Yet.
MH&S: I’ll just mark you down as saying Murray Jay’s the greatest….
Moloch: Who?
