#also sorry the capitalisation of entities and stuff is inconsistant throughout this

[radioactive-juice]

Okay so I just watched a video about the extinction from some guy’s Entities series and. Thoughts:

I feel like a lot of people forget that the Entities are not completely separate things. We have the colours analogy and the Giant Creature with multiple limbs too big to see that it’s all one thing. So, as much as it’s useful to understand stuff, Smirke’s 14 is canonically a very flawed explanation of something very difficult to comprehend. 

Especially with the revelation that the rituals will never work by themselves and that the entities need to all come into being at once, it’s clear that they are more connected than they are independent. 

The video was talking about the statements that are contested in terms of whether they are Extinction or whatever else. First, they can be both. Second, the point of the extinction’s Emergence isn’t so much Totally New Never Before Seen Fear but Fear Becoming More Widespread So We Should Distinguish Itself From Others. Fear of drastic change, the end of life as we know it, etc, existed before the Extinction was thought up, and will exist even though the Extinction never technically Emerged. Dekker says it is branching off from the End, but I think that’s still too rigid. 

In mag200 when we get the origin story of the fears, it starts as “Once, there was fear”. It’s one thing that starts to specialise as life gets more intelligent and learns the things to be scared of. Then, “The thing that was fear felt itself began to tear, to crack and fracture along a thousand unseen fault lines”. So, we do have confirmation that it isn’t just One Thing. But they started as one, which begs the question, where do we draw the lines between Fears?

I think a lot of us have the idea of Which Entities Are Which based on their motifs, which I think holds back our understanding. The Web is one that particularly gets me. As an Entity, it’s about control and manipulation, but a lot of the time it’s boiled down to Fear of Spiders. Spiders symbolise control because of their webs, the idea of being trapped, knowing your fate but unable to escape it. That’s the essence of the Web. Falling into a spider nest and getting them all over your face? Horrifying, but not the right psychological aspects. I’d say it’s more Corruption, feeding more on the fear of disgusting things. I think puppets would be an interesting motif for The Web, but puppets are like dolls which are basically monopolised by the Stranger. Now I’m starting to rant. In general, I believe we could have a lot more interesting interpretations of the Entities if we thought of them more as the psychological fear they represent rather than their common motifs. For example, I really like what they did with the Buried also representing debt rather than simply Dirt. 

On the fandom wiki (I know it sucks. If there’s a better alternative lemme know), a lot of the s5 domains are described as serving multiple fears, which makes sense since they cater so closely to the specific fears of the people in them, which aren’t necessarily a single Fear. Then, of course, we have Protocol. I’ve seen a few posts echoing the same point of We Don’t Need to Rethink the Fears to Make Protocol Make Sense, We Just Need to Stop Defining Everything So Rigidly. I hope Protocol continues to Get Weird with it so we’re forced to think about the Fears from a different perspective than Archives. It’s healthy. It’s enrichment. 

In conclusion, the Fears aren’t so separate, Smirke’s 14 has never been real, the Extinction isn’t a world-breaking anomaly, and motifs don’t necessarily define what Powers are actually at play.