#but in tma its sorted that way because we distinguish them that way and-

[chai-en-kaadhale]

a water bender can bend water but also bend ice which is solid water but they can also bend every liquid but that would imply that if the liquid were a solid that they would be able to bend it so really can't a water bender bend pretty much anything so long as it has a liquid state like rocks w/ lava i mean can a water bender earthbend also isnt air just a bunch of elements that have liquid forms so can a water bender airbend like except fire bc it doesn't afaik have a liquid state can't a water bender bend p much everything and even with that in mind all elements do have a plasma state and if its established that water benders can bend air and therefore every chemical element and therefore plasma can they firebend also realizing that this lowkey applies to every other bender you just see it with water benders more like where do you draw the line right can everyone just be the avatar if they try hard enough

//conspiracy theory over

[ollieofthebeholder]

leaves too high to touch (roots too strong to fall): a TMA fanfic

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Also on AO3

Chapter 9: Jon

“Sit down, boss,” Tim says insistently.

“Jon, please,” Martin—the real Martin—says, his voice soft. “We’ll explain, just...sit down. Please.”

Jon doesn’t want to sit down. He wants to stay standing, to put himself between this—this thing wearing his assistant’s face, his skin—and the three people he’s already nearly lost tonight. But he responds to the please and sits, slowly, never taking his eyes off the creature claiming to be Martin Blackwood from the future.

It’s a good likeness, he has to admit. The...creature or whatever it is looks almost identical to his—the real Martin, down to the odd twist in one set of cables on his sweater (not that Jon’s spent a lot of time staring at Martin or his sweater, of course, only that it’s not quite even and the oddity catches his attention) and that one errant curl that never seems to do what he wants it to. But this creature is also...muted is the best way Jon can think of to describe it. As if someone has turned down the saturation on a picture, or coated the whole thing in a grey wash.

“How long were you waiting for us?” Tim asks the other Martin. It seems safer to think of him that way.

“Not long,” Other-Martin answers. “Maybe a minute.”

“Really? It took you that long to get here? Must’ve been a hell of a complicated route.”

Other-Martin gives a soft snort of laughter without a lot of humor in it. “Time in those corridors doesn’t follow the same rules. As far as I could tell, I was only in there five, ten minutes, tops.”

“Tim, you invited this here?” Jon exclaims.

Tim shrugs. “It seemed safer than leaving him in the tunnels under the Institute. You know, what with the worms and the police and everything. Hard enough to explain to us what’s going on, but someone who doesn’t deal with this every day?”

Other-Martin tilts his head slightly, but his gaze is directed at Jon. It makes him feel uneasy, for reasons he can’t quite explain. He tries to bring his chin up defiantly, but he’s aware of the fact that he’s terrified and wonders if this creature can smell fear. “And you expect us to just...believe you. That you’re—that you’re Martin come back from the future. There is no scientific explanation for time travel—”

“There probably is, actually, but that’s got nothing to do with how I came back,” Other-Martin interrupts. “And no. I don’t expect you to just...believe me. Not like that. I mean, especially not right now. I know you well enough to know you’re pushing the skeptic thing as hard as you are because you know it’s real and you’re afraid. You can feel something watching you when you’re recording the statements, the real ones, the ones that you have to do on the tape, yeah? That’s what you told me. So you believe in the supernatural and the paranormal and all that, but that doesn’t mean you want to. And it sure doesn’t mean you’re going to believe I am who I say I am without some kind of proof.”

For just a moment, Jon is speechless. He’s never told anyone about that persistent feeling, or his belief that the “difficult” statements are actually true encounters. He certainly wouldn’t have told Martin, although if he’s being honest, Martin is probably the only one he would have trusted with that knowledge. To hear it pour out of someone else’s mouth is startling, to say the least. It’s not really proof, of course, but it’s certainly enough to crack the shell of skepticism Jon hides behind.

“Wait,” Sasha interrupts. “You’re saying those statements...the ones that won’t go on the laptop...they’re real? Like, they actually happened?”

“They did, yeah. I know they’re hard to verify, but, well, that’s the thing about the paranormal. Ghosts don’t leave a lot of physical evidence. And...well, people see what they want to see, and they rationalize out a lot of things they don’t.” Other-Martin sighs. “It used to drive Basira nuts.”

“Basira?” Tim asks.

“Ah—you haven’t met her yet, I don’t think. Unless you...no, she was one of the officers on the scene when all this happened in my timeline, but honestly, I had a hard time concentrating on who I talked to that night and who I talked to later. I was too busy worrying about—” Other-Martin snaps off the sentence. “She’s a cop. One of the officers assigned to the investigation at the Institute. In our timeline, she...eventually got hired to work in the Archives. It’s—”

“A long story?” Martin says, sounding tired.

Other-Martin holds up his hands. “I know, I know. I promise, we’ll explain everything as soon as—”

“We?” Jon and Sasha say in unison.

“I didn’t come back alone. Well, I mean—we came back separately, but I’m not the only one who came back. We were warned we’d probably end up in different places, though.”

Tim lifts an eyebrow and grins. “Ooh, did you arrange a rendezvous at a secret meeting point? Send one another coded messages?”

“Tim,” Sasha hisses, elbowing him.

Other-Martin smiles, a little wistfully. “I wouldn’t say that, but...the plan we worked out before we came back involved us being at the Archives, so we were going to meet there. I have no doubt they’re on their way there.”

“And when they get there?” Martin asks quietly. “When they show up and see...everything that’s happening? What then? Did you have a—a backup plan?”

“Not really. But my guess? They’ll come looking for me. Or at least for you all.”

Jon tenses. “Looking for us? Why?”

“We were always planning to bring you all into it, after we...took care of Jane Prentiss. This wasn’t...exactly how we planned to do that, it got a bit out of hand, but I had to improvise, and I didn’t do it well.” Other-Martin gives another soft huff of not-all-that-amused laughter. “I’m quite literally lost without them. But I don’t doubt for a minute that if they can’t find me, they’ll come to you all.”

Jon is torn. On the one hand, he wants to shout at this creature, demand to know what its game actually is, chase it from the building, and keep it from coming anywhere near his assistants ever again. On the other hand...the more he talks, the easier it is to believe what he’s saying. Also, this isn’t Jon’s house and it’s not exactly his place to deny access to it.

“How did you get in here, anyway?” Jon decides a change of subject might clear his mind.

“Michael,” Other-Martin answers.

“That thing that attacked Sasha?” Jon exclaims. “You’re friends with it?”

“Oh, God, no,” Other-Martin says with another laugh that has no humor in it. “Michael hates anything to do with the Archives. Not necessarily without reason. I just managed to talk him into a temporary truce. Mostly I told him I knew what would happen to him and if he didn’t want to be utterly destroyed, he’d best help me out. I think that’s the only favor I’m actually going to get out of him, though.”

Sasha rubs her temples with her fingers. “Wait, wait. If he hates us so much, why would he tell me how to save everyone?”

Other-Martin hesitates. Beside Jon, Martin sighs deeply. “Is this another ‘telling you might be dangerous until someone who can protect you shows up’ thing?” In response to the startled look Jon shoots his way, Martin gestures at his doppelganger. “That’s what he keeps saying when I push too hard.”

“Look, I know it’s frustrating, but it’s also serious. You might be okay tonight, but...I’m just reluctant to risk it until—”

A firm rapping sound interrupts him. Sasha glances at Tim. “Somebody’s knocking at your door.”

Martin hums something under his breath, which brings that sad, wistful smile to Other-Martin’s face for a second. Tim gets up. “I’ll be right back. Try not to kill Martin Prime while I’m gone.”

“Really, Tim? Star Trek reference?” Sasha snorts.

“How about you? You understood that,” Tim shoots back at her before disappearing down the hallway.

Jon wonders whether to demand an explanation or not when a yelp comes from the direction of the doorway. He’s on his feet before he can think about it, nerves thrumming with adrenaline, not sure if he wants to launch himself down the hall to drag Tim to safety or stay where he is to protect Martin and Sasha. Sasha and...their guest rise from their seats, too, all of them tense for a moment. There’s the sound of voices, too low to be distinguishable, and then, unmistakably, Tim’s laughter, and Jon relaxes a little bit. Not hurt, at least. Then Tim comes back into the room, bringing with him a person who takes the breath from Jon’s lungs.

It’s him.

Or at least, the tiny part of his brain that insists on remaining skeptical says, it’s someone who looks like him—albeit a bit less like him than the other Martin looks like his—their Martin. His hair is longer than Jon is wearing his right now—more like the length he wore it in uni, if he’s being honest—pulled back into a sort of half-ponytail and far more liberally streaked with grey. His face and hands are dotted with round scars, and Jon’s stomach lurches as he realizes they’re probably from the worms. There are probably more scars, but they’re impossible to see, as he’s draped in a dark green sweater several sizes too big for him. He looks weary, like he’s carrying far greater a burden than one would reasonably expect to fit in the pack on his back, but he’s also smiling a little. It’s Jon’s smile, that’s for sure, just...sadder, somehow.

He stops dead just inside the room. All the tension seems to drain from him. “Martin,” he gasps.

The other Martin’s face lights up. “Jon?”

Jon swears he doesn’t see his counterpart move. One moment he’s standing just inside the doorway and the next he’s in front of the sofa, and the two of them are embracing tightly. The other Jon’s bag slips to the floor with a soft thud, but neither of them seem to notice it.

“Oh, thank God,” Other-Jon chokes out. The words tumble out in a semipanicked, breathless rush. “I couldn’t find you, I tried to use the—to Know where you were, but it was—I c-couldn’t see you and I was worried, I tried to tell myself you would be fine, but I—I didn’t think about—I should have realized whatever hid you from the Eye would mean I wouldn’t be able to see you either, but I thought since it was you I’d—”

“Jon, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Other-Martin says, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Are you all right? You’re not hurt?” Other-Jon pulls back enough that he can look up into Other-Martin’s face, but doesn’t let go of him. If anything, his grip seems to tighten just a little.

“I’m fine,” Other-Martin assures him. “I’m okay. Are you all right?”

“I am now.” Other-Jon pulls him into another tight hug.

Jon feels a bit like he’s watching something he shouldn’t be privy to, but at the same time, he can’t look away. Partly because the reunion is so compelling, partly due to what feels like the same thing that grips him when he’s reading those statements, but mostly because he does not want to see the look on Tim’s face right now, thank you very much. And he’s not sure he can look at Martin without making a fool of himself.

Whatever else happens in the future, he finds himself thinking, at least he loosens up enough that he can express how he actually feels instead of trying to hide behind a professional facade. Because this is pretty much how he wanted to react when he saw Martin emerge from the quarantine tent—to wrap him up in a hug, to tell him how glad he was that he was safe, to reassure himself Martin was alive and whole. It’s why he was so quick to help him walk. He almost envies his future self this freedom, the ability to just wrap his arms around Martin and know he’s all right. Whatever else they’ve gone through—and from their appearances, they’ve been through a lot—at least he has this.

He realizes the direction his thoughts are trending and clenches his teeth, mentally grasping the last bit of skepticism in his mind with both hands. He still can’t be completely sure these two are really them from the future. Yes, they look a lot like him and Martin, sound like them, but...what was it his cousin used to say? Correlation does not imply causation. There could be a perfectly normal explanation for this—a non-supernatural one, one that doesn’t involve time travel or the end of the world or anything like that. He’s just got to figure out what that explanation is.

Tim, naturally, is the one to break the silence. “So!” he says, settling onto the sofa and stretching out his arms along the back. “Should we be expecting Tim Prime and Sasha Prime to come along any minute now?”

“No,” Other-Jon says quietly, drawing back from Other-Martin with visible reluctance. “No, it’s only us.”

He turns to look at Tim and Sasha, and Jon finds himself torn between the desire to shift and stand between them and the fear of leaving Martin exposed if he does so. He takes a small step forward and speaks up, drawing the attention back to himself. “How do we know you’re really from the future? What proof is there that you’re really who you say you are?”

“Well, we believe them,” Tim says. “Or at least we believe him.” He waves at Other-Martin.

“Not good enough, I’m afraid,” Other-Jon says before Jon can. There’s a faint hint of amusement in his tone. “You’re all rather too credulous. It’s easy to convince you. He’s far less ready to believe on flimsy evidence. Proof, that’s what’s needed.”

Tim tilts his head sideways, as if considering that. “He’s certainly got you pegged, Boss.”

Jon narrows his eyes. He rather suspects he’s being mocked, and he doesn’t like it in the slightest. “If that’s the best you can come up with—” he begins.

“A Guest for Mister Spider,” Other-Martin interrupts.

Jon’s entire body goes still with horror as the memories come rushing in, not that they’re ever far from his mind. He fights very hard to keep it from showing on his face, however, and says as evenly as he can, “I beg your pardon?”

“Your grandmother bought it in the bargain bin a charity shop when you were about eight.” Other-Martin’s eyes seem to stare right through Jon, as if they’re seeing him all those years ago, walking down the streets unknowingly with his nose buried in a book. “It was your first encounter with the supernatural. Your first encounter with the name Jurgen Leitner. It’s why you came to work at the Institute in the first place.”

The words are as gentle and as inexorable as falling snow, and just as chilling. Jon’s very soul seems to freeze. He stares at the other Martin without really seeing him, without really seeing anything except the darkness within that door, the boy whose name he can’t remember vanishing in its depths, the growing smears of red on black and white drawings...

“Jon? Jon, are you all right?” Martin sounds worried, but he also sounds very far away.

Other-Martin looks slightly embarrassed as he turns to look at Other-Jon. “Too far?”

“No—no, I-I think that was...just about right.” Other-Jon reaches out and presses two fingers to Jon’s shoulder, pushing him downward. “Sit down and breathe, Archivist.”

It’s the word Archivist that pushes through the fog in Jon’s brain, oddly enough. It at least serves to remind him that he’s not actually eight years old anymore. He draws in a deep, shuddering gasp of air and sits down rather heavily, jostling both Sasha and Tim.

Other-Martin and Other-Jon sit down as well. Jon notices, with the part of his brain not currently paging through the Owner’s Manual to the Human Body for the instructions on breathing, that Other-Jon rests his hand on top of Other-Martin’s. Other-Martin strokes Other-Jon’s thumb with his own in slow, careful strokes. It’s a gesture that speaks of intimacy and tenderness, and a jealousy curls in his stomach that he has no idea what to do with. Other-Jon’s free hand taps on his thigh as his eyes flutter closed, and for a moment, Jon assumes it’s an idle fidget until his brain latches onto the regularity of it and realizes what it is. He’s counting out the seconds to regulate his own breathing.

All the fight goes out of Jon in that instant. He knows when he’s beaten. This other who bears his face is him, not some stranger or monster or evil being. Which means the other must be Martin. They are from the future. They’re telling the truth.

He’s not going to admit that out loud, not just yet, but they slide from being Others to being Primes, as Tim called them, in his mind.

After a moment, Jon Prime squeezes Martin Prime’s fingers briefly, exhales, and opens his eyes. “I...I suppose you have more than a few questions.”

“You could say that,” Tim agrees.

“So where do we start?” Sasha asks, the last word nearly being swallowed in a yawn.

Jon is burning with curiosity, but he also recognizes that Sasha is tired, and likely Tim as well. And Martin...Martin must be absolutely wiped out. His own energy, the adrenaline that’s been driving him since he saw the emergency lights at the Institute, is starting to flag. It’s late.

“As much as I’d like to know what the hell is going on here, I think most of it can wait until tomorrow, when we’re all fresh,” he says, putting as much authority into his words as he can. “I need to get your statements before you start forgetting the details.”

“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Sasha says, not quite under her breath.

Martin Prime snorts. “It’s not. Best to get your statements done now, though. Trust me.”

Tim raises an eyebrow. “I think Martin should go first.”

Jon turns to look fully at Martin. He’s visibly exhausted, but he nods, eyes fixed unwaveringly on Jon.

Jon exhales. “All right, then.”

[silenthillmutual]

2020 Creator Wrap

I was tagged by @stvlti to do the 2020 Creator Wrap: Favorite Works tag! Thank you, sm!! c:

Rules: it’s time to love yourselves! choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought to the world in 2020. tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

Tagging: @lawliyeeeet​ @soupcans @kunoiichi @milk-teeths @darkpaladin and anyone else who wants to!! Though there’s no pressure to do this if you don’t want<3

So... according to my AO3, I seem to have published or updated 63 works in 2020, which is just a whole hell of a lot more than I usually do! So I’ll pick the going from oldest to newest that I’m most happy with :)

CONTENT WARNING though, under 18 please do not read below the cut as two of the fics are M and one is E. Additional content warning: two deal with self harm and one with intrusive thoughts, and one with pregnancy.

01 || Communication (T)

I think this was when I really hit my stride with understanding how I wanted to characterize Daniil, specifically, and more generally when I worked out how I wanted to write his relationship with Artemy. I tend to focus on the ways in which they communicate differently, and I think I pulled off their voices relatively well.

Favorite moment, when I managed to slip some autism into my characterization:

This is a flaw of his - a messy, embarrassing secret, this inability to distinguish jokes and sarcasm from serious discussion. He masks his insufficiency with a flat-toned seriousness. People find it harder to separate the sarcasm and the jokes from his regular speech when he makes no vocal distinction, and he enjoys the discomfort it brings in others. He considers it, to a degree, payback. A taste of their own medicine. And when he wants to make it clear where his feelings lie, he’ll be picky with the words themselves. He is, if absolutely nothing else, exceptional in the area of verbal self-expression. 

02 || sine sole sileo (M)

This is one of my older works and it is far from being my best, it’s terribly out of character and woobifying, but I’m fond of it as my first really long and more emotional work for the fandom. I had fun writing the first chapter out as a Twitter thread, and then expanding on it. It’s multi-chaptered and actually finished, which is something I have a hard time with!

Favorite moment, which I still actually kind of like, despite everything:

He knows the silence behind the doors, too. It’s a stillness that makes the tips of his fingers buzz. How many days has it been now? Three, four? Artemy though he’d changed the sheets, added new notations. Welcomed in the vocals, the strings, the what-ever-else accompanied performances like this in the Capital. His verses hadn’t been well-sung, but the band had started to play with him. He’d come to anticipate the thrumming percussion. A heart with its own rhythm. Footsteps that rose and fell. Words that lilted, that lead, that brought the symphony to a heightened frenzy.

But silence is a kind of noise too. Where the heart doesn’t beat. Where the voices don’t speak. Even when there is nothing, there is noise.

Artemy has to take a breath before he opens the door. He knows he won’t like what he sees, but he’s seeing so much more in his mind than will be there to greet him. His eyes shake and jostle him to great many things: a gun, a hook, a rope, stained bedsheets and curtains ripped from windows. He sees death even before his eyes adjust because he can smell it, and because he can hear it.

Twelve, he thinks.

03 || o tempora, o mores (M)

This fic was my baby! I wanted so badly to write a character struggling with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder the way I do, and while it’s not my best-performing fic for the fandom (I haven’t kept track of which one is, actually) it’s probably my favorite. I worked so hard on this one, trying to replicate what it’s like to struggle with OCD, and it felt so gratifying to do. I’m currently working on a follow-up to this one, and I’m very excited for it as well!

Favorite moment is really the whole thing, but I do like this in particular, because I feel it really resonated with how intrusive thoughts and compulsions work for me:

The self-talk gives him enough of a boost to get him through the doors of the hospital. It feels safer here, where there’s only the ill and the dead instead of the thousand living eyes trying to touch him. No one comes to bother him here, just him and Artemy and sometimes Clara and Rubin until a few days ago –

YOUR FAULT. HE IS SICK BECAUSE OF YOU. HE IS IN TROUBLE BECAUSE OF YOU. IF RUBIN DIES, IT IS BECAUSE OF YOU. “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” Daniil mutters. THE EYES KNOW THE VACCINE DIDN’T WORK. THEY ARE WAITING FOR YOU TO ADMIT IT, ADMIT THAT THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TO PROTECT THEM SO THEY CAN HAND YOU TO THE DOGS. THEY WANT TO RIP YOUR BODY OPEN AND DEVOUR YOU. CANNIBALS, ALL OF THEM. AND YOU CAN’T RUN FOREVER. “Stop it,” he repeats, and tries to dig a jagged nail into his wrist.

It won’t go. Too slippery from the ointment Victor applied. He has something in his bag to help, another jagged edge, a rusted pair of scissors lost to their original purpose. The Morae were busy here, he’d thought the first time he saw them, and had laughed at his own clever joke. But now he feels the red string is his skin.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.                                  (it is starting to hurt these could be infected they are dirty they are rusted,) Eight.                                     (but it has to be ten he has to get to ten it has to be even) Nine.                                     (has to be a multiple of five but even always even, no odd numbers in sight)

04 || vita in motu (E)

Heheh I’m in danger (chuckles).

I’ve only managed to get one piece of hate for this fic which I figured would draw way more ire and make me orphan it, and I’m glad I haven’t had to because I’m stupidly attached to the concept. I was trying not to go for E rated fics for this, but this fic meant so much to me to write and for something marked explicit I put a lot of thought into how I wanted to characterize Daniil for it.

So. Yeah. Publishing it was scary as hell but I’m glad I did. I also got some really nice feedback on it, and more than I expected to. I’m very happy with how it turned out.

Favorite moment was actually much longer at the start of it, though kind of like with o tempora, o mores I actually really like how the whole fic turned out. But I really liked this part because I view Artemy as someone who would be very grounding for Daniil to be with:

“Stay in the moment,” Artemy tells him, and kisses him again, kisses him slowly. “Stay here with me. I love you.”  

 It should be utter nonsense, to give in so quickly to this, but Artemy makes it easy. Daniil would never have seen this in his future, would not have even made this as a joke. Something had to beat down his resistance to the emotional, a pro to outweigh the cons he associated with vulnerability. Keeping tightly bound was the safest bet, the easy one. He could say he lacked emotion, and anyone would buy it. Nothing short of a miracle could drag him back to the land of the living – but then again, nothing short of a miracle could have saved this town. Artemy Burakh is a man who manufactures miracles.  

05 || it’s sacrilege, you say (T)

This is the last fic that I wrote out that I took a lot of time planning instead of going “hey, I think this idea would be neat” and slapping it onto paper. And I think it turned out really well!! I almost wanted to do something darker with it, more akin to Silent Hill, but I have other ideas in mind for that kind of AU that I’ll play with later, one of which will be a sort of crossover with TMA.

Favorite moment is when I actually implied the twist, though I’m not sure you can call it a twist at all when I used proper tags:

Her eyes drift from Daniil to the wall, pivoting to look through the window. “No,” she says. “I don’t know why he made you.”

 The center of Daniil’s chest feels like a flower, budded but unopened. Smooth, perhaps, but heavy to move, and his petals are made of something sharp. Crystal, maybe. And he can feel the petals start to part with her words, though they make so little sense to him. He steps forward, closer, half expecting Aspity to recoil from him, but she stays unnaturally still as he approaches. He reaches out to wet his lips, dry as sand, before he speaks. “Made me?” There’s no tone in his voice. “What do you mean, made me? And who are you talking about?”

 She doesn’t turn to face him. She blinks, and lashes fall on sunken cheeks. “Do you remember how you got here, doctor?” He opens his mouth, but she’s faster. “Not to my home. To Town. Think: Can you remember how it is you came to be here?” Daniil grinds his teeth on the side of his tongue, sharp edges digging into the flesh. The flesh.      The flesh    . “Take your time,” she says, but it sounds like a joke. “The last train that arrived brought the menkhu, and no one else aboard it. There are no other ways into our Town.”

[healieas]

levels of beholding feeding; aka, will this successfully feed me or the eye?; aka, there are actions that beholding avatars are likely to take that may not constitute life-sustaining feeding; aka, the illuminati food pyramid.

the post where i break down what i personally consider feeding the eye to entail, including things that fall under the eye’s “jurisdiction” ( remember that fears are malleable and bleed into each other, and the eye especially tends to overlap with everything else bc it is a gratuitous voyeuristic sack of fuck, but for the purposes of this post i am going to try to focus on what in and of itself is eye fear and if it overlaps well that’s just fun and sexy isn’t it ) but do not feed it, things that engender beholding behavior but are not in and of itself feeding, things that eye avatars need to do to maintain themselves, and things that make the eye sigh and go “ah yes that was great food.” also this does not detail beholding powers. i’m just talking about the food, man. the gifts the eye grants its avatars is another story.

first and foremost, what qualifies something as feeding the eye? how does the eye “eat”? if something falls under the following categories, it feeds the eye: fear of being watched, fear of being exposed, fear of being followed, or fear of having your secrets known to somebody else. if something falls under the following categories, it is eye-related behavior likely performed by avatars, but is not in and of itself “eye food”: pursuit of knowledge, especially at the cost of one’s own health or sanity. obviously the latter can enable the former if that pursuit of knowledge is at somebody else’s expense, but what separates the two categories for me is that, to keep the eye as an entity from spreading so thin to the point where anything can be construed as capital-b Beholding because it involves observation or information, is holding fast to the eye being a fear entity. i.e., something can technically be in the eye’s territory of knowledge, but it does not become eye-related unless there is an active element of horror. of course, what constitutes “horror” is subjective, but i think that narrows down the options and removes, say, doing a book report from beholding. tma has a tight thesis of beholding being the horror of watching something terrible and doing nothing to intervene, or the inherent evil of inaction when one is witnessing an atrocity. 

therefore i’m going to make my grading for eye food the following. ( note that like... there’s grey area in between each level where, by taking a lower level to an extreme, you could slide it up to the next, etc. )

level one: are you watching in an obtrusive way? i.e., is this something you should be seeing? are you an active participant? or are you eavesdropping. things that fall into this category include people watching, listening in on conversations, or reading private correspondence. this is the fear of being watched / known against one’s will at play, but only one person ( the avatar ) knows the secrets, so it’s low-level feeding. just hoarding secrets unto oneself gives the avatar what i’d consider a steady drip of water, necessary for life and remaining active, but after an extended period of time with just water, you’re going to want for food. 

something like following someone and making them feel watched as more than just a prickling on the neck for an extended period of time would probably start to actually feed the eye a bit, as was the case with the cursed mirror; someone with a constant and perhaps debilitating fear of being watched, facilitated by the actions of a beholding avatar, would advance to feeding the eye. 

institutionalized watching in an obtrusive way, i.e. the lack of privacy afforded to inmates in a place like millbank, ratchets up to full eye feeding. again, the longer and more intense the watching, the more intense the fear produced, the more likely it’s going to drift up into actual feeding territory. but as a casual action, it’s not sustainable.

level two: are you revealing to the person that you know their secrets? to distinguish this from the above category, i’m talking about the situation with elias and daisy / martin / melanie -- digging out someone’s secrets and then throwing them in their face, making them feel the despair of being peeled open for examination. what puts this at a lower level than mass exposure is the fact that it is probably only the beholding avatar who’s getting anything out of this. this is semi-solid food to the eye, like a gelatin or pudding or other soft hospital food. you can sustain yourself on it, but try to go for any extreme period of time just doing this and you’re probably going to suffer from malnutrition ( if you want to talk to me about malnutrition and how it actually works, aka you’re getting plenty of calories but not all of the components you need, and historic examples of mass malnutrition, we can totally do that; but i want to make it clear for those that might think malnutrition is just like starvation lite, it’s not -- you can be eating a ton of food every day and if you have no variety and if it lacks the proper nutrients, you’re still going to suffer the adverse effects; all this detail to say that’s what happens to an eye avatar who only feeds by privately exposing someone’s secrets to their face, a slow and conscious wasting ). 

constantly harassing someone about their secrets might make your diet a little more diverse, metaphorically, but this category really doesn’t have the same mobility as the previous one.

level three: are you making other people aware of the information you’ve gleaned? this is fear of exposure, where somebody is going to face the fallout and consequences of having something unsavory put on display for an audience. ( yes, this covers body image fears of people in the public eye, which is imo a flesh fear that the eye can also feed upon, but that’s an intense discussion for another post that needs to be handled with nuance. i only mention it to make it clear that like... it doesn’t even have to be something objectively horrid that’s exposed; if the person who is being put on display has a fear of being seen, that’s enough to put it in this category, because it is producing anxiety or discomfort. ) no need for bullet points! this gets more and more intense the wider the audience and the more people talk about it. this is solid beholding food with good nutrition! you could make a beholding career out of this! i’m certain that elias does some feeding by allowing students in to read the dirty laundry of named statement givers ( in addition to slurping the despair of visitors who aren’t going to be helped at all by the institute ). after all, statement givers frequently express fear of being pegged as “insane” or having experienced the denial, pity, or avoidance of their friends and family after their experiences. judgement cast upon vulnerability? eye food.

level four: taking a statement. this is sort of disconnected from the rest and may exist alongside them rather than above them, but canonically, reading and experiencing ( getting into character, allowing yourself to feel the presented emotions ) a statement feeds the eye. notice how jon works through tons of “statements” a week, documents gathered by the institute, but only reads one true statement a week on average. he “steps into the shoes” of the statement giver and re-experiences the terror, often while learning something about another entity and how it functions, increasing his own knowledge of the fear world. in my opinion, this is where we get into the eye simultaneously feeding on what’s offered and feeding on the avatar. jon is exhausted after reading a statement and needs to rest. multiple people state that it seems to take a lot out of him. he needs them to survive, but he also finds the experiences draining. this is a solid cooked meal, and the eye has the digestion of a snake, so if you get one of these a week? you’re good. 

level five: taking a statement directly from another subject, though? that’s just feeding. cutting out the middle man and the mental transportation of reading a literary piece ( or listening to a tape, or watching a recording ) means that you just get to feed off the person’s fear, because you are peeling them open and knowing them. this does relate a bit to level two, which is why i said it’s probably more of a horizontal relationship, but the difference for me is that you are forcing them to give an account of their encounter with a fear, thus accumulating knowledge of a lived experience and of the other deities, and you are making a person feel known and exposed, often ( in canon ) in a way that’s abrupt and uncalled for. willing statement-givers do not seem to have the same reactions as the poor people jon yoinks in public. taking statements seems to be compulsory for archivists in particular. whether or not it impacts administrators ( elias ) in the same way is hard to discern. maybe not, or maybe that’s solved by having the institute function the way it does, because all those statements are technically elias’s. ( i also have opinions on how elias feeds every single day but we’ll get to that later. the fear machine of the institute. ) this is good food. this is gourmet. this is why the eye stans jon. feeding just off of direct statements is going to cause your own power to skyrocket because you are eating so well.

there are probably more examples of ways to feed, and if people wanna shoot me ims or asks like “is this proper eye feeding?” i’d be happy to answer with my own takes on the situation ( because these are my own takes lol you do not need to live or die by this headcanon I Just Think My Theory Is Sound Enough For This Blog ). but now we’ll look at behaviors that may indicate a propensity for beholding, or that keep a beholding avatar in shape without feeding them; the exercise counterpart to a healthy diet. presented in bullet point form because these are not as in-depth as the above.

an inclination towards extensive research. not just looking up what you need for a book report and nothing more, we’re talking about going down a rabbit hole of research frequently out of a desire to know more. because this does not necessarily produce a fear response and does not necessarily deal with witnessing horror, it is not feeding ( i think about the idea of true crime beholding avatars and i get a little woozy because like... could it work and be canon compliant? certainly. is it therefore a valid take? it sure is. is it something i’m willing to get into? no, because it makes me personally uncomfortable sadly, because i feel some kinda way about the glamorization of serial killers and so on, and though i think an interest in true crime can be pursued tastefully, it’s so nuanced and so Not Me in particular that i just don’t want to get into it, even if i acknowledge that it’s something that probably exists in the tma universe because the tma universe is uncomfortable horror! )

being a nosy bitch. are you always involved in other people’s business, especially drama? do you subscribe to tea spill youtube channels? are you prepared to drop a hot tweet about something shady a celebrity did? ( THIS IS NOT A CRITIQUE OF OR COMMENTARY ON CALLOUT CULTURE INB4, PLEASE I BEG YOU. ) you have the beholding inclination to dig and reveal secrets! awesome!

a desire to organize and preserve information. i think often about this one because one of the things about the ceaseless watcher is that it knows but does not comprehend. it is not interested in understanding or exploring the nuance of what it observes, which is what makes it so horrific. it doesn’t care, the only thing it’s invested in is watching fear and accumulating knowledge so that it can “say” it has more information than anybody else. this, i think, is why beholding tends to center itself around academic institutions. the idea of gatekeeping knowledge, of an ivory tower, is so beholding-appropriate because if you think about the implications then yes, it’s bad. hoarding knowledge and not allowing other people to learn is not a good thing, and that’s why beholding is so very into it. HOWEVER, I AM ALSO DEEPLY INVESTED IN THE IDEA THAT THIS IS WHAT SEPARATES THE FEAR GOD BEHOLDING FROM ITS HUMAN AVATARS. because the avatars are painfully human! michael is proof enough of that i think! even if avatars consider themselves a different species, at the very least “formerly-human” categorically, they were humans and still have human flaws and inclinations. one of these, for beholding avatars, is organization. it’s putting the puzzle pieces together ( unless you’re bad at it, i’m so sorry jon you’re really trying and i love you, but in this case i think that has more to do with jon’s tendency to shoot himself in the foot / put himself at a disadvantage because he is afraid than a beholding-wide thing ), because the human brain usually wants to understand things. it wants to draw meaning from things. even elias, probably the least human of the beholding avatars we see, has to organize the information he has and put separate stories together to form a larger picture, because functioning in the human world just necessitates doing that! you want to stop another ritual? you can’t just gather different pieces of information and not relate them to each other, you have to categorize them and draw conclusions. and, imo, this is what separates the human world from the post-apocalyptic world. the post-apocalyptic world does not require analysis or organization, it can simply be; that is reality as warped and controlled by the fear gods.

there’s probably more to this but i have talked so much, i think that’s enough for now. anyways i care so much about beholding and how it functions and this is actually my least academic bullshitty piece on it, so yay for that. usually i’m all “voyeurism and The Gaze and how it functions in society and especially media!” but today? today we just talk about good eats.