#[smirke's 14] 👤

[itchyeye]

i just finished s4, mildly excited still for s5 despite knowing Opinions Are Divided, but i was wondering: what's the fear you wished they developed more, aside from the dark?

this is an excellent question!

i think for me the dark is the only one that feels underdeveloped. jonny simsirl mentioned in one of the q&as that he finds the dark to be the most difficult fear to write because of how quickly it devolves into cliches

and i really would have loved to see the dark being very closely allied to most other fears tbh. because fear of the dark is really fear of the unknown (stranger) and that ties in to the very primal fears of being unable to protect yourself (hunt, slaughter, eye, corruption)

idk if that's totally unique since we know that all the fears purposefully bleed together and into one another, but the dark i think is uniquely situated to work together with other fears because, really, if it's dark, your imagination is what's scaring you (spiral)

and it's such an abstract concept too it could very easily work hand in hand with the vast, the buried, and the lonely

the people's church is dope as heeellllllllll and it was meant to be a Big Bad like the stranger was and then we sort of got.... nothing. which gives me little to no insight into the kind of absolutely crazy sex manuella was having with maxwell raynor's last discarded husk

plus i am verrrrry curious about the relationship between jonah and maxwell since they seem to be utilizing the same body hopping trick

ok anyway on to your question: to me, the dark is the only fear that feels underdeveloped, because jonny was clearly avoiding it. that's like, his own comfort level as a writer, which i can't really fault him for tbh. it's good to play to your strengths. but it's then dumb to create a cult, a named recurring background character, a named recurring acolyte to this background character, a mysterious ritual, and then have it all amount to absolutely nothing. like... .come on, man!!

the fear i have the most issue with is the stranger, which i've talked about before here and here with @florenceisfalling because

i just think it's disorganized and poorly executed

i think it absolutely REEKS of stuffy british xenophobia in the same way so many of the flesh statements with the haan family do, and as A Russian it annoys me deeply to see jonny simirl pass off clearly un-researched cultural stereotypes and google translate names/phrases as Horror. you would shiver at a broscht recipe.

oh actually having said all that, the extinction is also very underdeveloped, for plot reasons that i think are sound. so i don't wish it was developed more. but i do find all the extinction statements really dull. i love the plotline of an emerging fear because i love adelard dekker with my whole heart he is one of my top fav minor characters. but the actual extinction statements are just... lame. imo.

[itchyeye]

👤 the stranger | the unknown. the uncanny. that kind of creeping sense that something’s not right. that guy you saw that might be following you, might mean you harm.

[itchyeye]

aaaaaa yes all good thoughts! see a lot of my thoughts re: the stranger had more to do with how it seemed too material and reliant on physical stuff. the spiral had a literal endless maze, but also had people's lives falling to delusion. the web had literal spiders, but also had the concept of control and all that. so even if you aren't scared of the more obvious manifestations, you still have the chance to be disturbed by the more abstract ideas.

but the stranger (as delightful as its monsters are, i love nikola and breekon and hope etc etc, they just don't feel as clever) relies so heavily on the idea that the listener MUST be scared of dolls or taxidermy or automatons, meanwhile i love all those things! and ive had plenty of nightmares involving the uncanny valley or identity, and concepts like the mandela catalogue scare the shit out of me. but tma never seemed to get to the core of why that stuff is freaky, just "hey wouldn't be fucked up if this happened?"

and like you said, they didn't seem to put much care into why a person would worship the stranger, which is strange (ha) to me because the options feel so obvious? i've met plenty of people who are so concerned with maintaining appearances (not in the Flesh way, in the social way) that they construct false identities and roles to play for themselves, and that seems fitting. idk! something !!

and they could've played with what identity Means more - in a story where so many characters are struggling with the line between humans and monsters, it would've been interesting to have manifestations of the stranger where you're left wondering if the spooky entity is actually a person or not (whether that be through not trusting the statement giver to be a reliable narrator, or through the question of What Is A Person? itself)

idk im sort of rambling jfc i didnt mean for this ask to be so long sorry but yes woo there r my thoughts i do not have many tma friends so i am deprived of enrichment

but tma never seemed to get to the core of why that stuff is freaky, just "hey wouldn't be fucked up if this happened?"

YES!! i think a great example of how this falls flat is the desolation, actually! because all of the follower's of the people's church of the divine host are made of wax

they are no longer human, their physical being is made of boiling, moldable wax

that seems like it should be a stranger thing, right? they're literally wax works, the unknowing took place in a waxwork museum and the dancers were all waxworks

but the difference is exactly what you've just said. the desolation's followers actually aren't scary because they're made of wax. them being made of wax is so far down the list of why they're scary i literally forget that it's true most of the time. whereas:

the waxworks at the museum are just scary... because they're waxworks. weird ones tho.

(as delightful as its monsters are, i love nikola and breekon and hope etc etc, they just don't feel as clever)

this is really really it!! the stranger's monsters just don't feel as clever

i really like your idea about someone worshiping the stranger because they're so image obsessed!! i would love to hear more about that. i think that would make a very interesting acolyte.

also i was thinking about this last night and i think part of what makes the stranger feel so vast (ha) and disorganized is that fear of the unknown is a fundamental building block of every single one of the fears

the whole point of all the entities is that they take things that are pretty innocuous (wasp nests, ant infestations, garden spiders, tall buildings, stairwells, hallways, security cameras) and turn them into something vile

the characteristic of "the unkown" or "the unfamiliar" is impossible to localize under one entity

also, understandably it took a while to establish all the mechanics of like what a ritual is, how it can be stopped, why people would want it to happen, etc

but it took the gang two full seasons and several major character deaths to stop the unknowing, while the black sun was solved off screen between episodes

and like yes of course like gertrude would be better at finding and stopping rituals because she has 50 years of experience! and yes it gets easier to find and stop rituals as you keep going. but the balance of the story pacing just feels weird, y'know?

this isn't the only time that i feel like tma does a massive amount of build up for a whole lot of nothing but it's up there

[itchyeye]

@florenceisfalling​

i would love to hear more of ur thoughts on this bc i love the stranger in concept but a lot of it fell flat for me on paper

hi yes i would literally love to talk more about this thanks!!!

so, i think the core issue with the stranger is that it’s just too vague as a fear. it encompasses too much, so it just becomes watered down

like yes on the one hand whenever some of the fears bleed into one another we can reference back to gerry and leitner explaining that they’re sort of like fingers on a hand rather than like.... h*gwarts houses

but fear of the unknown/uncanny can get reeeeally similar to the spiral, and the spiral handles/expresses being unsure of your own perceptions in a much better way imo

like, okay so the stranger focuses mainly on the uncanny valley, which can be expressed with like the fear of mannequins, dolls, clowns, etc. but i personally find it more interesting/compelling to express this with things like cotard’s delusion or capgras syndrome. mostly because statements about those things are going to have a more compelling interiority than anything based around dolls that come to life

so that’s sort of the core of why i find the stranger uninteresting? it’s just so tied to things i don’t find scary. like i’ll be real with you i don’t like dolls. i would feel skeeved out if i were in a room with a bunch of mannequins and it was dark. but the reason i feel things like this is tied to my own (extra)sensory perceptions, not the fact that the dolls are actually alive. does that make sense? like it would be more engaging for me to read a statement about a guy in a mannequin factory who becomes convinced that the mannequins are coming to life at night and changing their positions and he ends up destroying his life trying to find ways to prevent these mannequins from moving and keeping watch over them to make sure they don’t, rather than a statement about a guy who discovers that the mannequins at the mannequin factory are actually moving

and many of the fears have lots of varying manifestations. the spiral is a great example, actually. we have sergey ushanka, the distorition, the worker in clay, the creature that lives in the ming vase, the man upon the stair... these are all monsters that have very different MOs and very different presentations and all of their associated statements have a different vibe

but they are all focused on the mental anguish of their victims in a way that’s thematically coherent

vs. the stranger has:

doppelgangers/changelings

taxidermy

clowns/the circus more broadly

dolls/mannequins

animatronics/automata

soylent green replicant people

and like yes listed out like this it’s very easy to see the connection, but in practice is just feels... messy? why aren’t the soylent green anatomy students the flesh? they would make so much more sense as the flesh. why aren’t the not-them associated with the spiral? especially since they always pick someone who recognizes them and is then faced with the fact that all of their friends/family/loved ones are unintentionally gaslighting them

there’s just too many monsters... and i think also that the stranger really lacks the sort of worship that a lot of the other fears have their avatars express. like i’ve never got the sense that the stranger has acolytes or devotees. and that definitely seems like a deliberate choice rather than an oversight! but then why was wolfgang von kempelen devoted to his automata to the point of orchestrating the first attempt at the unknowing? he’s the only human/formerly human associate we know of the stranger, so why was he the one devotee when everything else that serves/associates with the stranger is a monster?

like it makes sense that if the stranger’s whole thing is replacing people that it wouldn’t have any human devotees, but that’s also boring to me. my favorite part of the fears is the cult of devotion they inspire from their acolytes so that being totally absent from the stranger just makes it really hard for me to... care. spooky monsters. big woop.

i also have personal beef that such a massive part of this entity as a whole and therefore such a massive part of two full seasons of the show are based in and around russia and i have not once heard one single russian word pronounced anywhere in the ballpark of “correctly”

which has larger implications about how this entity which is based on fear of the unknown is so closely tied to a deeply held british distrust of russia/the cultural divide of russia as Other from the rest of europe etc. (why was the previous unknowing attempted in hungary by a hungarian man) and i wrote a long post about that as well but deleted it bc it’s not really what you asked

basically i think the stranger’s clowns suck because it is more fun when clowns want to eat human meat and also fuck you, and that’s not really what the stranger is about, so there’s no room for captain spaulding or art the clown or pennywise or the killer klowns from outer space because that’s just not the vibe

which is unfortunate because clowns that eat human meat and are going to fuck you to death are like. the kind of clowns that make horror clowns fun. for me at least!

it's always funny to me that clowns and specifically horror clowns are one of my favorite things and i really dislike how tma did clowns... just proof you can't be good at everything i guess

but i am constantly thinking about how the stranger could have been good and how much that would change my own experience of the show since ths stranger takes up the bulk of two seasons