Curate, connect, and discover
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