If he hadn’t been sacrificed, I feel like Michael would have been more a victim and/or avatar of The Web.
I highly doubt Michael was stupid. To be honest, he strikes me as neurodivergent of the “if I just go with what they say, they won’t hate me” variety. He trusted gertrude to not… y’know. Kill him. I feel like that’s a pretty low level of trust, all things considered. He probably knew she was planning *something*, though he grossly underestimated the scale. Consider also that Gertrude was trying to intentionally deceive pretty much everyone so that she could go around obliterating Rituals and being a general pain in the ass to Jonah. It’s not a mark against someone to have been tricked by Gertrude. Hell, he was in an echo chamber designed to keep him ignorant!
Point is, Michael wasn’t stupid. He was scared. He was scared of being hated and left behind and not being enough for others. He was scared of failing people. He’d fall into anyone’s schemes, take any number of hits, whatever it would take to have people stick around and hopefully, maybe, protect him in return.
If it hadn’t been Gertrude and her assistants specifically, if it hadn’t been Fears and supernatural entities and attempts to end the world, he would have been manipulated, rather than lied-to-and-manipulated. He could break the Great Twisting because he *had* been lied to, not because it was the core of his fear. (Ignore for now that the Twisting wouldn’t have worked anyway, if 160 is to be believed.)
And every fear has a bit of manipulation in it, Gerry’s colour analogy rant and all. But The Web relishes in manipulation, in telling you true things that will lead you to the wrong conclusions to do what it wants. Michael was told he could stop a great evil. True! Sort of!
Anyways, Web!Michael when
Sometimes people ask if it's ADD or ADHD, and I'll let you in on a little secret:
It doesn't matter, it's the same thing!
In fact, it can be called any combination of the letters ADH in any order or number.
So like ADD, ADHD, ADDHD, HAHA, DAD, and HADADAD.
I found one of your posts saved to my photos from a year ago (based on the format I’m guessing I got it from reddit?) and decided to look up the username and it turns out youre still here and making cool scifi/fantasy concepts!! Hi
A fantasy/soft sci-fi story that features a race of creatures who are apparently - for no really sensible reason - all male. And upon encountering humans for the first time, one of them discovers that women exist. And this is an epiphany, and the most splendid news in the entire world as he knows it. Holy shit, women. It takes him some time before he stops making sure that every human he encounters is aware that women exist, it would be a pity if they wouldn't. They do, all of them do, and some of the ones that he addresses are women, who apparently come in a far wider range of appearances than he had previously been aware of. This, too, is amazing.
Neglecting whatever duties he was supposed to be performing while among humans, he focuses mainly on learning more about women. This leads to learning about human romantic relationships, which leads to discovering polyamorous relationships, and the LGBT community. All of which are splendid discoveries.
Eventually, after having not heard anything of their duty-neglecting emissary for months, the people receive one letter that basically goes "I am ceasing my mission and relinquishing my position in order to make a home here. Do not try to seek me, I am currently living in a household of seven women including myself, and I will fight you if you try to remove me. Farewell."
And these people, relieved to finally get a confirmation that they can get someone else on the task, just look at this letter like "what the fuck is a woman."
reblog if you think Alice Dyer is so sexy and deserves a 20 for all her troubles
Hi everyone long time no see. There’s a post on the miasworld tag by maddogs187. That is a pornbot. Don’t click on it, don’t click on the profile, they aren’t a new fan, they’re a pornbot with a very nsfw page. Shame the bots hit the miasworld tag somehow (it’s such a small corner of tumblr, h o w)
One time i left a persimmon in a bag for two months and only discovered it when my hand went through it. Very very unpleasant. Since then i have referred to the entire debacle as The Corruption Incident. I think the phenomenon as a whole can be described as a cross between Corruption and Dark. “There’s a thing there and it’s probably super gross but i really don’t want to know about or interact with it”
I think there needs to be a 15th fear added to the list and it's called "Uh Oh" and its the fear that There Is Something At The Back Of The Fridge And You're Too Scared To Touch It and See What It Is Or How Gross It May Be
HAPPY BPM DAYYYYYYYYYYYY
Happy Brutal Pipe Murder Day, everyone! Here are some of my favorite Leitner memes to celebrate. How are you celebrating?
Being jurgen leitner the day that gerry almost killed him was probably really surreal. Imagine you’re minding your business, collecting fucked up books, and out of nowhere this goth guy covered in eye tattoos shows up and beats you half to death, then stops, goes, “no you’re too pathetic to be jurgen leitner” and leaves without further elaboration. And you dont correct him, you like being alive after all, and after that you just… continue with your life. And then several years later you tell this to some random guy in the tunnels you’ve been hiding in, and he not only knows who the goth was, but seems somewhat fond of the goth. And then you get brutal pipe murdered by the random guy’s boss. Oops
i think what michael shelley wanted more than anything was to be loved or even just appreciated, but in the neurodivergent way where you think that the reason you aren't recognized is because you haven't done enough rather than because the people you want recognition from won't give it to you
the distortion reflects this by being bizarrely overt, making campaigns of terror against specific people, being the center (or at least a very hard-to-ignore presence) in the lives of its victims, rather than eating them outright or befriending them like helen does (which reflects a much more businesslike "get the job done, make some connections, and move on" attitude that likely reflects her job when she was human)
People don’t give website runners enough credit when things go down. Kudos to ao3 staff for handling two downtimes in as many days, resolving them quickly, keeping users up to date, and giving heads-ups for stability. Yall are incredible, thanks for keeping ao3 running!
Gremlin that visits random tags and profiles and likes 50 things and is never seen againMostly tma fandom thoughts tbhYippie
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