I Just Noticed That At The Beginning Of Mag 106, Melanie Does A Clap. I Haven't Confirmed If She Does

i would love to hear more of your thoughts on michael shelley!!! 🌀🚪✨

you're in luck because i've sat on thoughts about him for years and i finally feel like i can articulate them. because michael shelley is such a well written case of tragic horror in the horror tragedy podcast. and, despite my criticisms of season 5, it really did do an excellent job in concluding his character arc with the gertrude backstory episode. in a podcast where a common in-universe theme is that knowledge, and the pursuit of knowledge, is dangerous, michael is a subversion in that his ignorance of the horrors of the world he lived in not only didn't save him, but was intentionally engineered to make him vulnerable to exploitation and harm (which, on a broader scope, emphasises the futility of the world of the magnus archives - regardless of whether you participate in or turn a blind eye to the systems at play, involved or uninvolved, you are not safe).

furthermore, i really appreciate the subversion of traditional tropes of the sacrifice as a typically female figure taken advantage of by a male father, brother, or lover, whose tragic and horrible death is used to motivate him (whether to greatness or self-destruction), with michael being a son sacrificed by his mother (or grandmother) figure, who never actually loved him and whose 'frail' and 'nurturing' qualities were weaponised incompetence used to gaslight and manipulate him - and who continues to operate successfully (at least in terms of what can be said to be 'success' in a world like the magnus archives) without being haunted by any apparent doubt about the decision she made, or any hesitation to use others in similar ways, following this betrayal. which makes the fact that he's sewn into the fabric of a being that represents lies in their most insidious form, used as a weapon to devour people and destroy their lives, all the more abhorrent in hindsight - he is forced to not only relive his trauma in an endless loop (or spiral, if you will), but to become the mechanism which enables it. michael is taken to the edge of something evil (at least from a human perspective), and pushed over the threshold with no hope of recourse. there's almost a reverse orphic quality to it - he descends into terrifying other world, one which exists side-by-side with but fundamentally seperate from his own, against his will, and looking back will only cause him pain as he's assaulted by memories of a life he will never be able to reach.

i think a lot of people forget to look past the surface with michael, despite there being an entire episode dedicated to doing so. which is understandable, he's a very outwardly expressive character - but this is intentional obfuscation to hide an incredibly damaged victim whose hatred of this part of himself is integral to his entire reason for being, and which the rejection of causes him to be unmade, incapable of existing as this contradictory nightmare any longer. it's a mercy killing, and yet it is violent and painful, because michael cannot and should not exist, and excising that graft used to muzzle the distortion is as agonising as latching it into place was in the first place. when michael-the-distortion says about michael shelley "he was born. he was pointless. and he should have died." there is an implicit longing there, a rage at the way he was used, his decisions made for him and used to imprison something else instead of ever being allowed to exercise any measure of free will. because michael shelley probably would have died for the archivist, given the opportunity, but he never got the choice.

So we don’t REALLY know how much of an avatar Mary was (assuming that, like Jon, there’s a transitory period where you kinda sorta feed on fear but also kinda sorta are alive and need people food and such, before you die and go full avatar) but wouldn’t it be interesting if Mary was constantly feeding on Gerry’s fear of her

Fun fact: i used to think shark tank was about putting like six dudes in a tank full of sharks (of the large-enough-to-eat-a-person variety) and pulling out whoever had survived at the end of the day. And then they’d put them back in the next day and they would do this for a month or so until either everyone was dead or the season was over

Imagine if everyone in the world had a spawn point and every time you wake up you appear at your spawn point no matter where you fell asleep

I’m actually working on a corruption michael design (inspired by a bit with a friend involving jane prentiss and worm on a string) because jane and michael are really quite similar when you think about it. Im genuinely tempted to do a set of designs for him based on each fear now, seeing how each fear could overtake the same character is so fascinating. And this interpretation of the dark, going from the more traditional literal darkness and the unknown within it, to an intentional ignorance (whether intentional on your own part or another’s)… it seems obvious in retrospect but it never really crossed my mind, somehow!

Aaah! Lovely thoughts!!

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

wait

okay so you know Sasha's surnames is James and Tim's is Stoker

if we combine it

JOKER

THEIR SHIPNAME CAN BE FUCKING JOKERS AND WERE NOT USING IT???? WHY.

and they're literally the funny ones in the archives. they joke around with eachother a lot. COME ON PEOPLE

I put every bird I c could think of into this wheel. Spin the wheel. You're that bird now.

Hey what if the evil stepmother is actually deeply in love with the mirror and is mad at snow white because the mirror is into snow white so she decides that the best way to get the mirror to pay attention to her is to kill its crush

finding enough plastic in human brains to make a spoon is certainly a shocking headline but I just don't have it in me to be shocked anymore. not only can I see the evidence of spoon brain all around me I can literally feel it in myself