#an unknowing person would think these were animatronics

[downtherabbitholewithlucy]

My last two braincells scheming to fuck shit up

[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

[vulpinesaint]

ok fuck it angery about loki show again time for a rant about how the golden elevator fucks up everything about the concept of the timekeepers

so the timekeepers are meant to be god figures! i think we're all aware of that. they're held up as unknowable, unreachable beings, and the whole tva REALLY BLATANTLY runs on blind faith reliant on god figures that are only effigies! i think that's fairly clear.

now, what makes a god figure a god figure is the degree of separation between them and the mortals. the greek gods are atop mount olympus, where they can't be reached by mortals, and they strike down those who try. the christian-judeo god lives in heaven and listens to your prayers, but doesn't exist in earth. god figures are god figures because they're inaccessible to normal people! they have to be separate in some way for them to fulfill that trope. their power makes them Distinct from the class of mortals that makes up the majority of a given world (for a poignant example, loki is a god on earth because of his powers, and when he's on asgard with other beings with the same capabilities, he's just another person.) they're beings that don't really exist in the same reality as the rest of us. with the worldbuilding they did, having the timekeepers able to access the workings of the timeline, as some cosmic beings, i think it's safe to say that the timekeepers Should inhabit a different kind of dimension, whether that's Physical or Metaphorical.

so what the FUCK is with the golden elevator.

yes the aspect of an elevator brings with it the implication of Rising, going somewhere. HOWEVER: that door is just?? in a hallway in the tva? it's accessible by anyone, as we see when sylvie and loki just walk right fucking up to it and get in without a key or a password or any special knowledge about how to use it. and this elevator isn't displayed as something special or reality-traversing, other than the fact that it's gold; it kinda just feels like we're going up a floor. like the timekeepers are just sitting in the tva penthouse.

also: ravonna says at one point that she talked to the timekeepers, and they gave her clear instructions as to what they wanted. this fucked me UP when i heard it because you know what that means? EASE OF ACCESS to your gods. that absolutely defeats the purpose. it removes the mysticism, and it brings the gods down to your level just as much as them having a public-access elevator in the hallway! if you can straight up talk to your gods whenever you want, how do you have blind faith? how do you support that? sure, you could argue that only the higher-ups are allowed to see the timekeepers, but as far as i've seen, ravonna seems to operate on that same blind-faith principle as the rest of the tva; and if not, someone in that position of power has no reason to revere something that's just like. a general manager that you call up because they don't call into the office. some random person from the tva coulda just gone right up there!! like hello??? hello?????

honestly, when they went up that elevator, i was expecting nothing to be there. following the tropes of the show, inferring from what i've seen of other media, i was expecting an empty room; i was expecting ravonna to have been lying this whole time, delivering false directives from silent gods, which i think would have been a MUCH more interesting take on it than "hurr durr the timekeepers are fake robots" (which i ALSO expected, the moment they showed that their GODS were just SITTING THERE, ACCESSIBLE BY ELEVATOR RIDE.)

what an empty room would have provided is a Poignant representation of blind faith: a physical representation of the way that people will do awful things for something that doesn't actually exist. what the shoddy timekeeper animatronics provided: kind of? nothing? there were Beings there. they just. weren't real. (big surprise. they were accessible by an elevator that doesn't even need authorization.)

also like??? the whole concept of timekeeper automatons? who's controlling those. who is sitting there remote controlling a bunch of puppets and putting words in their mouths. jesus christ.

as a conclusion; the timekeepers are set up both narratively and socially as god figures, and then the loki show does EVERYTHING possible to destroy their credibility and believability as god figures, killing both the legitimacy of the entire faith of the tva and the surprise when they're revealed to be fake.

(also as my friend pointed out! the design of the fake timekeepers clash drastically with the vibe of the tva?? so they don't fit in the narrative from a literary perspective OR aesthetically. food for thought.)