Astonishingly, when I went to go comment on the eight year old thread for this episode, I found no evidence that it existed. Maybe I just didn’t look hard enough, or maybe Madam Mittermaier and Zhu Long have conspired to ensure their privacy is never intruded upon.
Anyway, I’m a fourth or less of the way into this episode, but I already couldn’t contain my thoughts about a story where the Fantastical Festival makes the mistake of ensnaring Parse. For some weird reason, canonical Parse is found in a mixture of standard superhero stories, gritty street level antihero stories, and she even goes to space, but I can’t recall a single instance in the card game where she deals with anything mystical. As the hero who most nearly resembles me in personality (other than maybe Dark Visionary), I like Parse a lot, and I especially like the idea of her looking at some source of magic, like the Ruins of Atlantis, and going “this is a code that I can crack”. She’d be a lot like Soothsayer Carmichael, who hadn’t yet been invented as of this ep, and a lot of mystic places would make sense to her in a way that they wouldn’t to other people, even some magicians. However, the Festival is specifically designed to defy understanding, and I think it would be tremendously fun to show a story where Parse goes there, and she is just DONE with this crap after like five minutes!
It’s weird that the Festival isn’t more tied to the Cult of Gloom innately, as its primary function seems to be generating insanity and despair, with the latter being fuel for Gloom magic and the former nicely tying into Gloomweaver himself being a god of nightmares. I almost wonder if he views MM as a sort of rival upstart that he’d want to try and crush before she can actually challenge his supremacy over the Realm of Discord. Kinda makes me want to see some feminist writer working at Sentinel Comics do a story where Glamour utterly punks Gloomy and takes over the Realm, leading the next writer of Nightmist comics to need to restore the status quo in a story called “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss”.
(PS: the mention of a mother going lost at the carnival reminds me of how badly I need to see the movie Shazam again.)
(PPS: I wonder how they found “Oh No They Found Me”, as I assume he was Lost Without A Trace at the time.)
But we don’t fully understand her motivations, other than living forever (or at least a very long time). 
