#do i think it deserves a similar horrifying fear trauma backstory as the various horrible monstrous fear avatars? ummm yeah

[equalseleventhirds]

THEORY: the line between fear-monster and fear-avatar is not as clean as we pretend. as in, can we really be sure that the so-called monsters were never human (or animal, or bits of human/animal)?

yes, creatures like the not-them and the monster pig and the angler fish seemed essentially unkillable (leitner said the not-them could not be killed, only contained; gertrude had the pig encased in concrete bcos supposedly it couldn’t be killed; daisy shot at ‘sarah baldwin’ and didn’t kill her). but how does that differ from avatars like oliver banks, who comes back to life, or john amherst, who had to be likewise encased in cement, or jonathan archivist himself, who is p much undead? there are different rules for different avatars, so who’s to say the monsters aren’t like them? and, well, the angler fish seems to have died at the unknowing, and it turns out the not-them can be killed.

and jonny mentioned in a q&a that the monster pig was a monster bcos it just appeared rather than being made from existing pigs. sure, that’s word of god, but i’m killing the author: if, say, annabelle cane just fucking showed up somewhere and started doing spider shit, to the outside observer she would seem to have Just Appeared, even tho she was human before and then became monstrous and then showed up somewhere else. we can’t know the monster pig was not a normal pig like, a hundred years ago, became a flesh avatar, and has been wandering around sneaking into pig pens and terrorizing people for ages. we just never got its origin story bcos survivor’s bias.

there’s also been discussion that becoming an avatar requires a choice. where does that put someone like agnes? she made no choice. she wasn’t a traditional fear monster as we’ve come to know them; she also didn’t fit into the avatar mold. we could say fear-touched, but the desolation did more than touch her, it was her. so what was she?

and simon fairchild, when asked about the monsters, responds initially with ‘what monsters?’ he only comes up with his response about ‘imagine a hand’ when martin elaborates that he means ‘things like the distortion’ (which is interesting, since michael and helen both specifically were human once, and became the distortion through a choice, unaware and unknowing the consequences as they were, and thus would be both traditionally be avatars.) (simon is a liar and a conman, i’m saying. simon told martin what he thought martin was prepared to hear and understand. simon’s also older than smirke’s fourteen and prolly would have some shit to say about that, perhaps.)

what i’m saying is, join me in my new concept, partially inspired by 165, of the not-them starting out as a human, cast out in some way by society, who stole identities, took on new names, wore costumes and makeup and disguises, and gradually became the monster we now know.

in 165 the not-them was furious at being known. and i think the poem-statement jon spoke, the experiences of the riders on the merry go round, might have originally belonged to the not-them.

‘a world where if you’d wish to have a name it must be stolen, carved and pulled full-bloody from the frame of others who would wish in vain to hold their selfness close. you want a face? take it. there are so many here, and those who cannot hold them, well, whoever chose to give them such a gift must take the blame, knowing they could never keep it in a world of so much thieving strangeness.’

‘and soon enough they will forget they ever had one.’