Spiralling-spires - The Spiral's Special Little Boy

Idk if this is more Vast or Spiral coded. Depends on who you ask I guess. Or maybe it’s both!

"Hey, mom? Can you come pick me up from school? Yeah, the sky is filling with fractals again."

Maybe this is just the sleep deprivation but what IS the difference between the desolation and the slaughter when you get down to it? Both deal with indiscriminate destruction. Is destruction of humans so far removed in the public conscious from destruction of property? Or is it that the slaughter tends to deal with war, government mandated destruction, and the desolation deals with smaller scale/less overseen destruction?

Aaa

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.

hear me out

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."

I had a really gut wrenching realization about tma and opened a new post to write it and then i forgot help

It was like. The worlds saddest fanfic concept or something. Like i hated it and loved it in equal measure because it hurt in a good way, you know what i mean? Like when you really like something and you know its gonna hurt but you cant stop. Wait im just describing the experience of being a tma fan now

This is why we dont let the cicada ruminate on fandoms after 2 am. Their attention span decreases to about a half second

Sad to announce there’s a new kind of spambot, basically an account that likes your posts. The pfp is usually an attractive woman and the content of the blog is 100% nsfw.

They’re liking posts, and if i’m not mistaken, yall can see who likes my posts. Been trying to ban them as I see them, but if I miss one, i’m deeply sorry if you click on who liked my posts and end up seeing those profiles (i’m a regular “searches for other fans of my obscure interests by looking at the notes”er, so)

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

So much imposter syndrome you could call me the NotThem