#but we also know michael cant keep existing as the distortion AND be truthful about its motives and intentions

[moodr1ng]

not to be cringe fandom on main but i desperately need the tma fandom to write some michael fics that actually engage w the character and the very interesting psychology hes got going on. and that dont just go for the much easier and less compelling "ooh everything looks distorted and weird and inhuman and colors that dont exist that make your eyes bleed" etc horror which i find incredibly trite and overdone not to mention i think the fandom has vastly overblown just how present that kind of horror actually is wrt michael, who imo utilizes the mundane far more than the eyestrain fantastical, and whose horror i find lies far more in a subtle distorting of your reality which is essentially gaslighting than in a super in your face and literal distortion of reality which doesnt have the same psychological impact. like i wish people gave the insomnia story a lot more focus when it comes to how michaels horror operates bc that is far far more effective than any number of like, limbs that bend the wrong way or melting faces or whatever. and bc of that i also wish when people try to write some sort of romance w michael they would continue to engage w the horror inherent to the character and indulge in a deeper inspection of what it means for a character to be defined by lies, to be fundamentally incapable of truth, and whether something that has nothing underneath the lies in some way embodies the lies such that they become truths - i find the idea of a being that, whether what its saying is factually true or not, is in essence dishonest in such a way that it can use the truth as a lie a lot more interesting than just "hes always straightforwardly lying".. and from there how you can possibly handle the idea of writing romance involving a being that cannot make itself trustworthy if it wanted to. but whatever