#man I love nhthcth so much

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Hi! I’ve sent you two asks already, sorry for bothering you. I just can’t stop thinking about nhthcth, but I was wondering, does Jon get paid? Was he getting paid as a child?

For some reason I got this idea in my head that if Jon didn’t get paid the contract wouldn’t work. Because like, contracts are usually an agreement that one person does one thing and gets another thing in return. Like the Magnus Institute’s contract is like “you work here and never leave and sell your soul to me and I’ll give you maybe more than minimum wage,” so if Jon didn’t get paid, the Institute wouldn’t be holding up their end of the contract, so Jon wouldn’t need to hold up his end and he could leave.

Although I don’t know how that would work when Jon’s a child, he wouldn’t have a bank account, (does he have one as an adult?) I assume it would just go to his legal guardian’s bank account, which I guess would be Elias, but did Elias ever fully adopt Jon? Like legally? Did Elias have to forge adoption papers and stuff or did he just kidnap a child and hoped he’d get away with it. (I suppose he did get away with it) does Jon even have an ID? How did he go to university when he doesn’t have any school history past third grade?

Anyway, sorry I started rambling, you of course don’t have to answer this (nor do you need my permission not to answer, so I’m not sure why I said that) this is just a funny little question I was thinking about. Also, sorry if you’ve answered this already or there’s something in the fic that would answer it and I didn’t notice. Thank you for the amazing story and answering my other asks.

So, you've actually hit the nail on the head on one of the very important rules for nhthcth as a universe, insofar as like, magic systems (for lack of a better word) goes. That being said, a lot of the specifics of this ask is something that I can't answer due to spoilers (like how he went to university, whether elias ever adopted him, whether he has an ID). Those will receive direct explanations in the course of the fic so I can't answer them here.

But as to like, the magic system itself, it's already been seen/addressed in the fic (in a lot of disparate bits and pieces), so I don't have a problem with a more detailed explanation below the cut.

so, most of this system has been in subtext and broken up amongst a lot of little moments in the fic itself. its there but figuring it out takes a lot of patchwork. I don't currently have a more explicit breakdown of the system in the narrative itself because having like, Jon explain it super explicitly feels a bit too much like those internal monologues of an anime fight scene where the characters are having these really in-depth breakdowns of what they're planning and what's happening while they're throwing each other through walls. I just like more subtle storytelling, personally? A lot of the time, it just becomes so painfully obvious that they're talking to the audience and it feels clunky and unnatural. So I scattered the foundation of this amongst a bunch of little moments throughout.

You're absolutely dead on about contracts needing to be "one person gets one thing and the other person gets the other." That is a hard and fast rule in nhthcth, and it has everything to do with what the Web is.

One of my favorite bits about TMA world building is that the fears as so metaphysical. Which makes for a very fun (again, for lack of a better word) magic system. I hate it when magic systems break their own rules or become too powerful and you can just supercharge on the Power Of Friendship to do basically anything if you Believe Enough. Personally, I think characters get to really shine and show their intelligence when you stick them with very narrow and firm rules and make them work inside that system without breaking it. TMA in particular does an amazing job with that.

The Fears are the platonic ideals of their own identities and they legitimately cannot resist what they are. The episode with the Web's theatre production best encapsulated this: The Web said something along the lines of "If only you could see the strings on me."

In that same episode, Jon almost got trapped in the Web domain watching endless plays, because the Eye could not resist what it is, and what it is is something that spectates pain endlessly. The Web couldn't resist trapping Jon in there, because that's what it is, despite the fact that it would have fucked its own endgame if it trapped the Archivist in its fucked up theatre production until the End claimed them all. They're incredibly powerful beings, but they're still, in a way, trapped by their own nature. Humans can change, adapt, be different, but the Entities can't be anything but what they are.

In nhthcth there's a line that i tend to use again and again to encapsulate this, and it's usually something along the lines of "These things only are what they are."

They're not versatile forces. They're not a flexible tool like most magic systems where you can use this abstract and malleable force to cast the Spell of Fire and the Spell of Healing and the Spell of Ketamine Ape. They can only do what their own existence allows them and they cannot resist their own nature. It's one of the reasons why Jon in nhthcth is so insistent that the Eye can't be used as a force for good--good is completely outside of its existence. If you know anything about Greek philosophy, I think Plato's idea of the forms is pretty analogous to what the Entities are and how they work.

Which is also why Jon's like, "Duh, of course it's the Web that's got us bound and not the Eye. That's what the Web does."

The Eye just isn't about binding and trapping. What Jonah can use it to do is completely limited to stuff that falls under the Eye's umbrella. He could have the most powerful connection to the Eye on the planet (he doesn't), but that doesn't mean he can supercharge on Eye God Juice and blast a hole through the wall with the power of his mind, right? That would make the entire magic system in TMA ridiculous. In the same way, he can't use the Eye to enforce contract terms. That's not what the Eye does.

That's the Web, through and through. So when you're considering the contract, you have to think in terms of what the Web is.

The thing about the Fears is that they're shown to be a little multifaceted in that multiple distinct fears fit beneath the same umbrella with them. Take the Eye. The fear of someone knowing your deepest, darkest secrets fits beneath it, right? And that's very much Jonah's area of expertise. He probably fed on Martin's terror about being discovered for forging his CV for years. He neutralized Daisy by finding out the secrets that hurt her and using them against you. He's the invasive, watching part of the eye that may know your secrets and want to use it against you.

but the Eye is also the fear of someone watching your pain, your suffering, and (for lack of a better term) getting off on it. Enjoying it. It's bleeding out in the street and, when help finally arrives, they just sit down next to you and watch eagerly as you die.

That is so much the Archivists role.

Sometimes, I think of how terrifying the Archivist would be if it wasn't Jon in the role. Don't get me wrong--he has his moments of terrifying power, and he definitely didn't get good reviews on yelp from statement givers. But, fundamentally, he does care.

But imagine you go to the Magnus Institute under the assumption that they may help. You sit there and you tell them the worst fucking thing that ever happened to you. It's like you're experiencing it a second time, in all the horrific detail. You're retraumatized all over again, and then the Statement ends and you're sitting there, tape recorder still running, and you realize the person you went to for help just... enjoyed every second of pain you went through. There's one episode in particular that I think pulled this feeling off so well--the one where the guy in Scotland who found Gertrude's circle opened with something along the lines of "I don't care about any of this. I just want to know if you'll save my son." Like, imagine the horrible, crushing horror of going to someone for help and the moment you realize that were never going to do anything. They just wanted to watch you die too.

It's also one of the reasons that I think that Jon, for all he thrived as the Archivist, kept so much of who he was because of the inaction part specifically. In Season 1, he makes these vague mentions to fights he's getting into with Elias. Elias keeps lecturing him about noninterference, how they're here to research and not interfere, and Jon has these moments were he's like "anyway I don't give a fuck there's fucking leitners out there and if i have my way there will be a hell of a lot less of them." He legitimately says at one point that he's going to get another lecture about Institute mission statements and watching without interference.

Jon made so many bad choices when he was Becoming, but the one he consistently made against Becoming was that, almost against his will, he wanted to save people. That's picking the opposite of what the Eye is, and I think that that's the part of him that he got to keep.

that was more of an aside and not so relevant to the question. i got on a tangent. but it's here now so it stays. i already typed it. Anywho.

Jonah can't do what Jon does. He can't compel answers out of people. He's a panopticon, and the fear he embodies is that someone may be watching you and catch you in the act. It's not the fear of someone forcing the information out of you. But Jon can't do with Jonah does either. He can't just hop through eyes and spy on people. That's not his relationship with the Eye or the part of it he embodies.

They both have a very metaphysical limitation to their own experience with the Eye, because the idea of the Eye itself is just a human classification. Maybe Jon's sky blue and Jonah's dark blue and the Eye's all the blues, but at the end of the day, we just made up the idea of "blue" to explain our own experience with colors. They don't get to wield the full spectrum of "colors" available under the Eye. They can both be attached to the Eye but they're completely limited to what it means to be sky blue versus dark blue.

So it's important to remember that when you consider the contract, because it's just an aspect of the Web. It's not every aspect of the Web.

The Web is the fear of being totally under control of another--think raymond fielding in Hill Top Road, Mr. Spider, forcing people to walk, that kind of thing--but it's not just that. It's also the fear of being manipulated. Of being outmaneuvered. And I think that fits much more metaphysically with what a contract is than being under total and absolute control.

A contract is just an agreement of rules that two parties have to abide by, right? And sometimes the contract is way more favorable to one party than the other, but we also recognize that there's limits to that. You named a very big one--"this for that." For contracts to be enforceable, there has to be this thing we call "consideration." I get this, you get that. If the contract read "I have to give you one million dollars and you don't have to do anything" that'd be a gratuitous promise and it wouldn't be an enforceable contract.

That being said, consideration doesn't have to be balanced. The contract doesn't have to be fair. I don't know a super huge amount of British law (though a lot of American law is derived from it) but in american contract law we have a standard that basically says there has to be a "mere peppercorn" of consideration. We're not going to see if the exchange is fair, just if there is an exchange. there's this huge body of law around what's allowed in contracts and how contracts should be interpreted because we recognize that, at a certain point, something isn't a contract anymore. It breaks the rules of exchange.

And I think that very much goes towards the real fear the Web would be working with when it comes to the contracts. Think of like, law dramas. People like law dramas because the characters show off how clever they are. They're working in some system of rules and then at the eleventh hour they pull out some kind of loophole or interpretation that saves the day, right? The fact that there are limits and rules to what the characters can do is exactly what makes it so exciting when they figure out how to flip them in their favor. You need to have the chance to succeed in the system, however small, or it all just kind of becomes meaningless. There's no point in manipulation or machinations if you instantly lose no matter what.

That's the exact fear the Web would be playing on with the contracts, in my mind. It's being at the mercy of someone who has to follow the same rules as you, but they're grossly skewed in the other person's favor and the other person is better at using them. It's being stuck in a game where both players have to follow the rules but you have no idea what the rules are, and the other player gets to know them and have them severely favor them.

But the entire fear just becomes kind of ridiculous if it's not limited. It kind of becomes like a game of make believe between little kids if you can just write something in the contract without limitation. Like saying "well, my power is at one million percent" "my power is at one BILLION percent" "my power is at FIVE TRILLION percent." Right? Like, if you're playing that game, the rules don't really mean anything. It's all just bullshit. It doesn't invoke the fear of someone manipulating the rules against you. If the contract terms don't enforce obligations against Jonah too, it just sort of leaves the realm of what fear this is, which breaks the rules of the magic system. Being totally at someone's mercy is just a different fear than having someone outmaneuvering you at rules you both are stuck with.

Which means that, for the contract to be what it is, Jonah has to be bound by it in some way. It has to follow some kind of rules that bind him too. It can be very unbalanced and favor him greatly, but it still needs to set some kind of obligation and limit on him or the entire thing becomes ridiculous.

That's why Jonah so aggressively tries to keep Jon from trying to learn the terms of the contract. If Jon knew the way Jonah was bound by the contract, he'd be able to use the rules against him. Jon's playing the same game as Jonah, but he never got to see the rulebook.

We know two ways from canon that you can use to escape the contract: (1) gouge out your own eyes and (2) the archivist dies and the assistants can leave. but we never see the terms of the contract itself, and the fact that option #2 popped up in season 5 when all we knew before that was option #1 means that maybe there are more ways to break the contract and maybe there aren't. Maybe it's just options 1 and 2, or maybe there's other ways to escape we never figured out. Why do options 1 & 2 work? Is it explicitly written out somewhere in the binding instrument? Is it some loophole that not even elias expected? All we know for certain is that ways out of the contract include but may not be limited to options 1 and 2.

So, yes, Jon gets paid. But is that a term of the contract? Was that the consideration that Jonah wrote down in the Web's binding contract, or is there something else? Jon doesn't know, so he can't use it against him.

Maybe Jonah does have to pay Jon under the contract. Or he's only paying Jon to keep up appearances. Like, yeah, maybe the metaphysically binding contract would allow him to chain people here without paying them, but payroll would still have massive questions about why the Institute Head's angry adoptive son has been the Institute's unpaid slave worker for the past decade.

One of Jonah's biggest strategies to keep Jon from escaping is to abide very strictly by what may or may not be the terms of the Web's contract. Jon can't deduce what the rules are if Jonah voluntarily plays by more rules than he has to.

Take Elias's promise to Tim, for example. Jon still doesn't even know how the Web contract is formed. It sure as hell isn't simply the contract that most employees see--there's no clause that says "and by the way you can never ever quit or leave or you will die xoxoxoxo." Are all the terms already written down somewhere he can't find? Could oral promises be binding? He has no idea, because Elias is never going to act in a way that lets him eliminate the possibility. He'll follow the letter of his promise, and maybe that's because he has to or he'll breach the contract, or maybe that's because he's choosing to keep his promise when he doesn't have to. Elias keeps the terms of the contract unclear by following more rules than he has to.

It's one of the reasons why he uses so much doublespeak. Elias says something like "I'll keep my word, and you'll have to do the same." That only tells us things we already knew--Tim would have to be bound by the contract and wouldn't be able to leave. He'll keep his word, but does Elias have to under the contract? If he broke his word, Jon would be able to conclusively tell that oral conditions are non-binding. He'd know that there's some kind of outside binding instrument that has the rules already set out, and Elias can't change them with an oral promise. But if Elias toes the letter of the oral condition no matter what, then it could be because he has to or it could be because he chose to.

There are rules that Elias has to abide by, but Jon is only pretty certain of a few: 1) He has to have Jon's signature before he moves people into his department. He can't give him assistants unless Jon signs off on it first. Jon only got that much because Elias tried so damn hard to get his signature for the transfer. If Elias could break that rule, there's a pretty good chance that he would have, but he didn't so it probably means he can't. It's a place the contract almost definitely binds him too. 2) the contract kills you if you spend too long away from the Institute, but Elias has a way of letting you stay away for longer. If Jon leaves without approval, then he gets sick within a few weeks. But he's made it months away from the Institute just because Elias approved the leave.

So is that because Elias is the one who triggers the contract killing you in the first place? Or does he have a way of stopping a power that will automatically go off.

If the contract reads, "In the case of unapproved absences, the Head of the Institute may file Form B45, the 'Kill My Errant Employees' Form, and the employee will suffer a heart attack within a period not to exceed fourteen (14) days," then they'd be able to pretty effectively escape just by finding a way to immobilize Elias permanently--chuck him in the Buried, he'll never die but he also won't be able to file a Kill My Errant Employee Form. But if the contract reads "In the case of unapproved absences, the employee will suffer a heart attack within a period not to exceed fourteen (14) days unless the Head of The Institute files Form U95, Approved Leave of Absences," then they need him alive and mobile to file a leave of absence form so Jon won't fucking die the next time he's kidnapped for a month. Or maybe a leave of absence form isn't necessary if Jon's only kept away because of a kidnapping. Maybe the contract reads "In the case of unapproved and voluntary absences" and being involuntarily missing isn't a breach at all. They don't know, because Elias is going to file the fucking leave of absence form whether or not he has to.

If they knew the exact rules and minute details of the contract terms, they could wriggle their way into an exception that makes their conditions more livable. Instead, they're just stuck with a very broad correlation between Elias's action and/or inaction and the contract not killing you when you leave for long periods on approved absences. Maybe they could just chuck him in the Buried and fuck off, but fuck if they know, and that's the sort of risk you really can't take unless you're certain.

A lot of Jon testing boundaries with Elias has been trying to figure out the boundaries of the contract. Remember in the martyrs chapter, where Martin is like "jon why do you have an employee email you're like sixteen???" it's because jon was already an employee, and employees are required to have an official email. He knew it and Elias knew it even if no one else did.

If Elias refused him an official institute email, Jon would know that the contract does not require him to provide all employees with Institute-standard resources as outlined in the employee manual. Maybe sections of the employee manual isn't binding, maybe the entire thing isn't binding. Jon knows breaking the Institute dress code probably isn't a part of the binding contract because of his Epic Fashion Moments (or, if it is, the penalty isn't death like leaving is), but does that apply to all parts of the employee manual? If he doesn't get an official email at the shiny age of sixteen when he's Not Supposed To Be Employed, then he knows another section of the employee manual just doesn't have teeth. But if Elias just gives him what any employee would be entitled to, then it could be because he had to or it could be because he chose to.

It's also the reason why getting people to quit was important to jon--yes, he was trying to get people free of the Institute, but if he pushed someone into quitting, he'd be able to test out some very valuable information about the contract. Can people quit if Elias allows it? Maybe the rule is that the Archives can't quit, but everyone else can if Elias allows it. Maybe everyone can quit if Elias lets them. Maybe no one can quit and they're all fucked. If Elias can let some people quit but never lets them quit, then Jon has no data points to work with when trying to figure out how people escape the contract.

Which is also why elias flipped his shit and burned the HR records the one time Jon managed to get his hands on them. Over the years, there have been people who unknowingly stumbled into one of the rules binding Elias, and he let them quit without protest. There's a very good chance that that's because he had to let them quit. If Jon could find the common denominator between people who quit successfully, then maybe he could figure out how to do the same, which is why Elias has spent so long making sure he gets as little information as possible to work with. Jon can't win the game if he never learns the rules.

It is important to note that Elias breaking the terms of the contract that bind him may not be "and now Jon can finally go home oh my fucking god." The penalties for breach of contract, that we know of, are death. Does Elias face the same penalties if he breaches? Does he face some kind of other penalty? We don't know yet, because Elias is guarding those terms like his fucking life depends on it.

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Oh no, but I have read that one and I highly recommend it to everyone. The author's incredibly funny and talented, and the read itself is great.

The off the wall fic is one of mine and it's currently unpublished. I call it, affectionately, the Himbois AU. the premise is that Jon walks into Agnes Montague's cafe one day, and it domino effects him into being on the run from the Web with Gerry Keay and an amnesiac Danny Stoker, who have plenty of their own things to run from. Out of sheer lack of other options, they decide to start a ghost hunting youtube channel, because they sort of look like drug dealers what with the everything and need a way to explain why the keep fucking around in the most haunted fucking places ever.

Except they're physically incapable of acting like static in an empty house is serious paranormal activity when they're actively being stalked by the spider that ate jon's childhood bully, so it turns into a Buzzfeed Unsolved AU from there. Jon and Gerry (with Danny as camera man) go viral as ghost hunting skeptics and they are fucking sweating.

what do you mean they’re the reason you started posting fanfic again

?

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okay but what are the three nhthcth songs tho

So it’s important to note that Songs for me don’t always have a perfect correlation or fit with lyrics matching the story and is more based on the overall Vibe somehow clicking with what I want the story to be.

1. Bad Habits by The Federal Empire

This was the original Song and it was the background for the vast majority of plot creation. I listened to it so many times that skewed my Spotify wrapped to a ridiculous degree. It specifically became the Song because of Daisy and Jon’s relationship in nhthcth.

Like, when I build a plot, there’s a lot of jumping around and figuring out how it all fits together. It’s always a fun, pleasant surprise when my brain knits together the very separate parts and tells me how we get there. Which gives me a very distorted perspective of the story, because the order I get information in tends to be very different than the order y’all get information in.

nhthcth loosely went: initial Tommy bradstaff confrontation-> daisy and Jon buddy cop adventures-> horrible devastatingly sad backstory that got us there-> ohmygodisthatDannystoker-> rest of it

Bad Habits really had sort of off the cuff, mildly ill-advised and self-destructive, chaotic dynamic I wanted between Daisy and Jon. Like, I knew I wanted them to be really messy in this, because they were supposed to live in this sort of in-between in canon characterisations for them. They’d never had the buried, but they had to be past the point of “Daisy is hunt mad and wants to kill Jon in the woods.” They had to exist in this space where neither of them had progressed to the same point as they did in season 4 to stop feeding entirely and were in this sort of half-measure where they were trying to ignore the reality of their situation and make it work as best they can—and, you know, save the world while they went.

Like, I loved them so much. They committed so many crimes. Pov you’re spooky and you get brutalised in the woods by woman who looks like she kills people for the mob and man in cardigan who looks like he died last week. They were morally ambiguous and fucking hilarious. They weren’t allowed in France anymore. Dream team buddy cop between deeply violent woman and utterly exhausted man. I was obsessed. It was so fun and zany in my head.

Then I came up with the devastatingly sad parts and devastatingly sad ended up being the tone y’all got instead of fun and zany but it was too late the Song was set. Yes, Jon’s horrible traumatic past was created while listening to this fairly upbeat song. We get One Song per story it’s the rules of my brain.

But then it became so convoluted that it ended up getting more Songs, which was unprecedented.

2. Two Birds by Regina Spektor

The second song nhthcth, and I can’t say what part of the story it belongs to because we haven’t gotten to that part yet. I will say that it is a Song that belongs to Jon & Gerry.

3. Never Forget You by Noisettes

This is actually young Jon & Gerry’s Song. I really liked the fit for them because it sounds so upbeat and energetic with lyrics that are a little bittersweet.

Like, I can’t emphasize enough that Jon and Gerry were happy together. When they ran, they were genuinely happy kids who were glad to be alive for the first time in their own memories. They loved each other, they loved each and every adventure they went on, and even though they were in a completely shit situation, it was the happiest they had ever been. And even when they lost it, that period of their lives was always a sort of light they never let go of—and never stopped trying to get back.

This Song really had the jaunty, fun vibe that I wanted Gerry and Jon to have when they ran together, and there’s this overarching yearning and bittersweet reflection that I thought echoed how it ultimately would end in them being dragged back in the most painful way possible. It sort of acknowledged that it didn’t work out the way they hoped but it doesn’t diminish the joy and love that they had before it was lost.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

(1/6) Hello! I'm so glad to have found your tumblr! Somehow I missed it all this while lol. I just wanted to say thank you thank you thank you for all your fics, every single one. They all really mean a lot to me. You really are one of my favorite authors on the internet. I always know whatever fic you choose to write is going to somehow, inevitably, make me cry whatever the fandom.

I'm such a big fan of your writing! Expecially I love the tragedy of Gerry and Jon's relationship in nhthcth, the way Jack cares so very deeply for a son he doesn't even know is alive and feels he has horribly failed, and absolutely love the way you wrote Matt Murdock's view on the world in his one shot. Every one of your fics are so very very wonderful. I love your writing style (especially the one you chose to use for the Jack fic oh my goodness) and the way you incorporate things you know from your real life (specifically all the stuff about american law) to its fullest extent in your work. You have such a way with words, with conveying emotions, with

articulating your points. I love the way you write love, and the way you write tragedy. I love the way you write moral dilemmas and all the different ways different people see the world. I'm trying to avoid saying any more specifics (for this entire extremely long message (though you might have noticed I failed a tad bit earlier lol)) because otherwise I'd be here all day, but yeah. Man I love your writing. I'm very sorry for word vomiting all over your inbox lol. I just want to somehow tell you about even a fraction of how much your writing has impacted my life. I'm really thankful for everything you write. If you have any original fiction (or plans for any original fiction) please tell me I would love to know!! I would gladly spend all my money on it lol. Also, have to say, discovering that you go by Syn is about to revolutionize the thepolysyndetonaddictsupportgeoup fan club me and my friends have. Or at the very least cut our word count way down lol. Hope you're having a good day <3 Thank you again!!!

Hi! I just copied your other messages over into one big message.

Thank you for your message--it really means a lot to me that that you think so highly of my works.

I think I really love a kind of tragic love, and it leaks through in my works. You have Jon and Gerry, and you have Jack and Matt. And in all respects, they're loves that have sort of been dismissed. Jon and Gerry grew up as the thing that other people sacrificed. Everyone was willing to let them bear the cost of life and brutality. They're dismissed at every turn as trouble makers, as worthless, as liars, as murderers--but they're still preserving in love for each other. In the same way, Jack spends his life dismissed as another fuck up in the system, struggling to get anyone to just care about his little blind boy who's probably been dead for twenty years. And no one does. No one ever really looked for Matt. Except for Jack. The loves are tragic from their loss, but it's a kind of lonely loss. Like--someone dies young and tragically, and their family is on the news or on a crime documentary or whatever, and it's all about how this person lit up whatever room they were in. Candles on the sidewalk, the world grieves their loss. Gerry and Jon only really mattered to each other. The police treated the disappearance of Gerard Keay as a sort of "good riddance." Whereas Matt had the people close to him mourning him, but the rest of the world treated it like he was already dead. Wrote him off, didn't look, no grand police search for Matty Murdock. So you have this act of mourning that's sort of happening in the presence of people who don't even see the real value of the loss or love in the first place.

And it's interesting, because those were the loves that ended up defining the world. Jon and Gerry, whatever happened, had a love that changed the world while trapped in a web of manipulation. And the love between Jack and Matt ended up to be world-shaking itself--and it came from a poor deadbeat boxer of a dad, and a blind kid who should have been dead decades ago.

I dunno, the idea of this love that keeps its hooks in you even after its gone compels me. i write a lot of sad shit and i feel like it's usually sad because it once was happy.

Jack in toy rosaries and Matt in glaze defects have probably some of my favorite characters to write from so far. probably the only one who can really compete is peter in porcelain chips. like, both of their minds were so interesting? Jack's kind of felt like an impressionist painting to write. like--i dunno, he's blurry? everything's framed through the lens of emotions--mostly his regret and his love. he's also very old-school catholic. Like, i was raised hella catholic and you have these really old school catholics who are really traditional and literalist in their understanding of scripture and teachings. So you have Jack, who's got these really traditional ideas of forgiveness and the faith and the second coming, and it's washed through with someone whose life experiences have given him every single reason to distance himself from those teachings. So he's still got them at the base of how he thinks, but it's in direct conflict with what he feels spiritually, and it makes for this very messy, emotional, inexact portrayal of a psyche.

Matt, meanwhile, always felt more precise, if that makes sense. He's got all of these pillars and boundaries in his mind. like, you have buck v bell as a really formative experience for him, and you have this biblical idea of the sacrificial lamb, where he has always understood himself to be the one whose blood the world is willing to paint a door with, and it almost sets up these little checkpoints in his mind that he forces his own emotions to pass through. With Jack, he's this really messy stained glass window of guilt and love and everything's filtered through that tint. Matt's meanwhile constantly taking his own emotions and stopping them at these little borders of life experience and forcing them to a halt. It's almost an inverse of his father's approach.

And so you end up with someone who loves intensely, just like Jack, but it's something he's almost keeping in check from himself. you have all of these moments with Foggy, where Matt's wanting to give into his emotional instinct, and then--bam, it hits a checkpoint. and that's balanced with his constant daydreams of captain america, who acts as a sort of revelation to himself as to what Matt really wants in each stage of his life.

Like, you have him when he's little, and lonely, and afraid, and that little Matt always turns Captain America away, because he's trying to convince himself that he would turn Captain America away. He's trying to convince himself that he can protect himself from the government soldier here to use him. Because, at the end of the day, he's nine years old, and he's too afraid to tell his dad about what's happened to him, let alone anyone else. He's constantly battling this desire to be helped with his fear of being used, and he's trying to convince himself that he's going to be smarter, be clever enough, be able to see the trick ahead of time and defend himself.

And then, of course, Stick happens, and matt's internal desires change too. he had his captain america moment, and he failed it. in his mind, he let himself get tricked. it's his fault. So now he doesn't want to prove that he can protect himself--it's too tainted by failure. He wants to know that it was okay that he failed. so he creates a captain america that failed in the same way he did, who was hurt just like him, and maybe his mistake is a little bit less damning.

then, captain america is alive, and matt's older, and he's got karen and foggy but he's fucked up his life with all the secrets he kept. he doesn't really need someone to absolve him of stick anymore. he just needs someone to understand his fear, and about why he kept the secrets that he did. because he still doesn't have that. karen and foggy love him, but they still don't understand the fear he lived with all those years. he regrets hurting them, and the why doesn't change the fact that he did hurt them, but a part of him is still desperate for someone who knows what it means to be the carrie buck in buck v bell.

and then you finally get the captain america who just sits with matt on a stoop, who understands, because while matt has family now, while he isn't as lonely or afraid, and while he doesn't quite need anything from captain america the way he once did, a part of him can't quite let go of the fact that he's always wanted someone who understood. he's the one coming to captain america now, instead of the other way around--he doesn't want to be saved, so to speak. he doesn't need to be, and maybe captain america doesn't need to be either. he just wants someone who knows what it's like, and maybe captain america wants that too. and he's finally recovered enough from stick where he can make the overture instead of someone else, so he makes the approach to captain america's stoop instead of the other way around. and maybe both of them can be a little less alone.

i dunno, jack and matt are such fun characters to write. they're both so intensely emotional, but jack's very unbridled in his emotions, very messy, and you have matt who's constantly trying to keep himself in check and his emotions almost have to sneak through. i'm glad you liked them.

I'm a really really big law nerd and i feel like that leaks through like. a lot. not just with the fact that i keep insisting on writing about the supreme court, but also just because so much of law is about how you can get to two entirely different results based on how you frame an issue. and i think that sort of leaks into how i think about character's mindsets. everyone has values that they're weighing more heavily than other's, and it results in people coming to what they think is the obvious solution and what other people think is absolutely fucking insane. I could write an essay on how foggy's the platonic ideal of a lawyer's ethical system, and how matt's got two ethical systems at war within himself--a very catholic, lawyer-esque one, and a consequentialist one created by his life experiences that's directly at odds with his faith and profession. it makes for a lot of fun writing.

I do have original fiction! none of it is published, haven't made any attempts to get it published. Maybe one day. I'd love to be a writer, just got a ways to go first. thank you for your really kind message! i wish you the best!

also--the what

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

The latest chapter fully has made me lose my brain. You were right the Job and Daisy buddy cop jamboree IS the best. And that conversation between Tim and Jon?? Man. So much going on and so much going on just beneath the surface. Love the way Tim guilty thinks back to what Elias said about everyone using Jon, and love the way that is kinda what he's doing. Also love the way he *knows* something awful has happened but he doesn't want to dig into it because he doesn't want to risk pulling someone aboard Danny and his already sinking lifeboat. He can't afford to care. SO fascinating.

Also unrelated but were there a way to anonymously send you fanart (to prevent the off chance of someone I know irl finding my blog lol) you would be swimming in fanart. Because hoo-boy. Anyways love the chapter!!

Ahh thank you for your kind words!

Legitimately i cannot put into words how much fun i find the daisy and jon buddy cop jamboree. they're both so insane and chaotic. I have so many Shenanigans in my head that the two of them have committed over the years of their partnership that will probably never make it into nhthcth on account of it not being relevant to the plot. they're just such a fun dynamic. jon won't stop buying daisy stuff for her home renovations on elias's personal credit card. she's like 10-15 years older than him and they do everything together. sometimes that's killing the eldritch manifestation of violence and sometimes that's bottomless mimosa brunch billed directly to peter lukas. daisy went from violently fucking hating this guy to spending almost every single day with him and going on multiple vacations with him and no one understands why. they're so funny to me. I want them to have a wwdits style tv crew following them around at all times.

See i LOVE tim as a character because he's a genuinely good guy but he's also not without his own limitations and he has been shown to have like, an ability to recognize and accept when he can't change something.

Tim's instinct is to help. Like, he went back for Jon and Martin and literally carried Jon through the Jane Prentiss attack. At the Unknowing, when they were planting explosives, he was trying to convince everyone to let him try to save the victims of the ritual that were still alive. He's really, genuinely good, and he wouldn't have been like those people in the Institute who turned a blind eye to Jon growing up because he was worried about his job.

But he also has limits. Like, season 3, his anger overrode basically everything else, and when Sasha disappeared after the Season 2 finale, he wasn't trying to find her. Martin was sitting there begging Daisy to bring her home safe, and Tim, who was shown to be closer with her than anyone, had already given into a grim acceptance that she was dead and there was nothing to be done.

It was the same thing with Helen--when Martin and Tim were wandering Michael's corridors, they saw Helen trapped inside. Martin kept insisting that they should have helped her, and Tim completely shut it down, because he had this very bitter understanding that they couldn't help her, so stop thinking about it and stop talking about it. He didn't fight it; he accepted it; he did not try because of it.

Tim's a good person, but he's distinct from some others in the cast by the fact that 1) he will look at the practical realities they're living in and (bitterly) accept them, and 2) he's got some things that will override and take priority when he makes decisions.

Danny is and always will be the number one override for him. Like, we get so little on them in canon, but what happened to Danny seems to haunt Tim right to the end. Tim upended his entire life trying to find the thing that killed his brother. When we get the Statement on what happened, we find out that Tim is still searching all these years later, even if he did get a bit comfortable and complacent over time. Like, he can cite offhand the last statement given regarding a circus. He's still pulling all the books on Circuses. He never let go of what happened to his brother, even though he accepted (for lack of a better term) what happened to Sasha before he knew what happened to her and before she was declared dead. Danny had been gone for years by the finale, but Tim went to his death so he could kill the thing that took him away.

So Tim in nhthcth is in this huge phase of major internal conflict right now, because every single one of his major pillars of decision-making are in conflict.

Danny's his ultimate override. He's the thing that makes Tim not give a shit about anything else--everything has to fall away to Danny making through this alive. Unlike Tim in canon, he actually has a chance to save Danny. Canon Tim was willing to die over his brother's fate--a Tim that has a chance to save his brother will go so much farther.

But he's still someone who is able to clock when something's completely and utterly fucked. And Tim is the best situated out of everyone in the cast save Jon to understand how dire these circumstances actually are.

Danny's in little brother baby jail. He's spending all day trying to wriggle information out of Mike because Tim's pitching a bitch fit every time he tries to leave the apartment, and Jon doesn't even want Tim there, let alone Danny. He's playing Uno with Mike and trying to subtly slide in "hahah hey for the sake of conversation do you happen know of any like. evil contract breaking powers." He's trapped in that John Mulaney bit of eating triscuits and asking someone if they had ever seen a ghost. Thoughts and prayers for Danny.

Martin and Sasha's priorities are different from Tim, and the information they're looking at is different. Sasha, especially--she's chasing the contract, not the circus, and she's in such a state of paranoia that she's trying to rely on information that comes from her, not anyone else. She's not been exploring the Statements or been learning about the supernatural world the way he has.

For the most part, this happened off camera, so to speak, but it's been discussed multiple times that Tim's been tearing through everything that he thinks can help him understand what's going on and how to stop the thing after his brother. He's going through the library, he's reading all the Statements he can. He's been trying to get practical experience via tagging along with Jon, which keeps getting stymied, so he goes back to the library and the Statements.

Which means he goes to the Archives every day and struggles against the dawning realization that what they're trying to do just does not happen. He reads the Statements, and people either die, or they are let go, or they become the monster themselves. Options one, two, and three. And the vast majority are people who die horrible fucking deaths--or, worse, don't get the mercy of death. He has been spending every day desperately trying to find a Statement of normal schmucks like him and his brother beating something determined to finish their meal and going back to their normal lives, and they just aren't there.

Tim in Season 2 and 3 most consistently displayed an understanding that the supernatural was not something they could beat. People just get eaten by monsters, and that's their lives now. Nhthcth Tim has been getting that same horrible, dawning certainty of "This is a fight I have no chances of winning" with the immediate follow up of "But it's Danny. I have to."

Which makes him painfully conscious of the fact that he cannot afford to be a good person right now.

Because the thing is? Danny should have died in the theatre, as far as he's aware, and Tim knows it. He should have never even made it home that night. You don't get out on your own--these things let you go. Even if he somehow made it out on his own, Breekon & Hope should have been able to drag him back easily. He should already be dead. Tim knows it with a devastating certainty.

And he also knows that the only reason why he isn't is because Jon has been paying the cost of keeping him alive.

Danny getting out of that theatre cost him his skin. Mike protecting him? Cost Jon a food source, and apparently is going to probably get him tossed off a building down the line. Getting Elias as a backstop ended with Jon having to start taking live statements again and letting assistants down. Hell, Jon has to fucking escort him to and from Mike's every single day, because Tim may just get picked up by Breekon & Hope if he doesn't.

Tim's painfully aware that Jon’s well-being and Danny’s have a negative correlation right now. He is so uncomfortably aware that he's borderline sacrificing Jon's wellbeing for his brother's, and he's accepted that basically using Jon is the only way he has of getting Danny through this alive. It goes against his nature, he's a good person who doesn't want to hurt someone else for his own benefit, but he'll keep doing it for Danny.

And he knows that's going to be a lot harder to do if he gets to know Jon.

Out of all of the assistants, Tim actually has some of the greatest suspicions of how deeply wrong things are. Like, Martin saw how bad Jon got as a kid, but Tim’s been exclusively privy to Elias’s manipulative bullshit in a way the other two haven’t. He never got fed the lie of Jon being Elias's spoiled and beloved ward. His first introduction to this mess was Jon saving their asses several times over, and it has been nonstop red flags since then. One of the first thing that Jon tells him is that he hates being called Jonathan, and it's all Elias calls him. Jon turned into a nervous, frantic mess at the idea of assistants, and Elias has been trying to force it for years. He was sarcastic in the face of clown death, but actively scared at the possibility of Elias coming down. Jon cannot be reminded that man exists without launching into insults so creative that Tim almost feels like he should write them down for reference.

Tim spends more time with Jon than anyone out of the cast. He’s walking to and from work with him every day, spending time with him at mikes and at the archives, and the way Jon behaves fucking terrifies him. Both in a “your life is a spooky nightmare” kind of way and in a “you act like the aftermath of a tragedy” kind of way. He knows somethings deeply fucking wrong with Jon.

And he’s also genuinely honest about liking Jon. He doesn't like him the way Danny does, per se. Jon simply enchants Danny. Danny wants this man in his life forever. He wants to be roommates with him. He wants to go on a roadtrip with him. He is the world's most interesting man to Danny and Danny has never wanted to be best friends with someone so badly in his life. He's hilarious, a good person, and every single thing that comes out of his mouth is the absolute fucking wildest thing he has ever heard in his life. They fucking booked it from a monster clown together through a nightmare eldritch theatre together, which is the start of an epic friendship if Danny has ever heard one.

Jon’s a big “if only” to tim. Jon’s funny and kind and they get on great. Tim thinks that if they had met and Jon had just been Danny’s friend that he dragged home with him, he’d love being this guys pseudo older brother or something. But he’s clocked the situation, he’s figured out that Jon’s world is not something you can stay just out of the sightline of. It’s cut all ties or be eaten. So Tim’s already read the writing on the wall, made the mental calculation, and realized at the end of this, if they get out, he’s going to have to look the guy who saved their asses at his own expense in the eye and tell him they’re abandoning him forever. Thanks for the rescue that was costly to you in unspeakable ways, please never contact us ever again.

Tim needs Danny out, alive, and everything he’s seen and read has led him to a not unreasonable understanding that that’s going to require using and abandoning Jon as an absolute best case scenario. That’s weighs unbearably heavy on his conscious when Jon’s someone he likes and is actively worried about. If he knew the truth? It would be impossible.

[ozmosisjones]

these posts are microdoses of nhthcth and for that, bless.

Jon, lying facedown on the bed after coming home from the mixer: I can never show my face in public ever again. Gerry, trying not to smile: there there, at least you helped them with their pet? And now I’m imagining Jon having to do a group project and the other members trying to figure out what Jon’s deal is.

jon, after doing one (1) group project and spawning a joke across campus that he's secretly possessed: gerry they're onto us

gerry: i doubt that

jon, insistently: gerry they know

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

E for nhthcth, M and Q, please?

E: If you wrote a sequel to [insert fic], what would it be about?

The thing about nhthcth is that it's going to be very bad for a very long time and then it's going to all get resolved one way or another, for better or for worse. I don't want to say anything about how that ending is going to go, so I'm going to keep it vague.

I'd probably do a sequel with a drastically different tone. Now, it's all plot and serious dark stuff. I'd probably do something really fluffy as a sequel. Like, roadtrip/roommate sitcom/silly fun happy stuff as a sort of "where do we go from here" recovery healing thing. No plot whatsoever. The ending yall get is going to be the ending of the plot, and it’s going to be absolute.

M: Got any premises on the back burner that you’d care to share?

oooh soooooo many. i think the ones i'd most like to one day write (if i ever had the time) would be:

Buzzfeed Unsolved!AU with Gerry Keay, Jon Sims, and Danny Stoker, wherein a few idiots on the run from the supernatural try to cover up their monster-filled lifestyle by pretending to be like, really shitty ghost hunters, only then they accidentally become popular. for being skeptics. as to the existence. of the supernatural. that. they're on the run from. oops. featuring a gertrude who cannot believe that these idiots are actually succeeding.

Peter Parkers Roommate Drama following nwh, wherein they got a fucked up glitch while the wizard was doing magic that let them bounce back and forth between dimensions, so they just. find the one that has the cheapest rent. and all live there together. commute to their own dimensions for Spider-Man and work. because it's too expensive to live alone but they can't have roommates without risking their secret identity. featuring multiple daredevils, avengers, wade wilsons, and j jonah jamesons.

Bucky Barnes Designated Driver AU, wherein Matt Murdock makes so many wrong decisions they round around to the right decision. Daredevil helps out the Winter Soldier, offers him a safe place, and the sheer dumbfuckery this asshole is capable of starts tearing through years of hydra brainwashing and leaves bucky barnes as the only one with sense stuck with the entire new york vigilante population. featuring a half feral peter parker, a may who has been convicted of felony arson and only regrets getting caught, a long-suffering foggy nelson, a terrifying Karen page, and a bucky barnes who cannot believe how fucking stupid these assholes are.

this isn't a fandom I've put anything out for before but I have this elaborate Fake Dating AU between All Might and Inko from My Hero Academia, except instead of Fake Dating it's fake bitter exes. Problems at the entrance exam results in Izuku's parent being called, only he doesn't want this to be how his mom finds out he has a quirk so he calls all might to get him instead. only. they already called his mom. And he called his “dad.” And everyone just sort of decides to roll with it to cover up OFA. So everyone thinks inko and all might had a reallllllllllyyyy messy divorce and are trying to hold it together for their son, that they had together. featuring an exhausted aizawa, an enthusiastic and earnest iida, and a shinsou who has learned entirely too much about the symbol of peace’s home life.

Q: Do you have any discarded scenes/storylines/projects?

also so many. there's a lot of stories that I love but that I’m pretty sure I’ll never write, and a lot of stories where I ended up changing the shape of the story and losing some of what I had. In nhthcth, there was originally a storyline involving Naomi herne and Evan Lukas. I ended up trashing it because it mostly served to bring in another character, and I could do that in a much easier and more direct way. Danny’s story is actually the opposite—he had a much smaller role, and then he ended up getting developed and becoming a central character. I ended up trashing Mike crews original role in the story as a result and rewriting it entirely.

Jon and Gerry made me so sad in nhthcth that I actually have like? 90ish pages? Of a fanfic of like, my own fanfic, where Elias didn’t do his due diligence and bind Jon young and they actually escaped. Agnes Montague was there, and aged down for the sake of the story. In my head, it was called the Gerry Keay Home for Disillusioned Child Messiahs. Fun story, but I’ve ultimately discarded it.

There’s a lot of stories that are just too long for me to commit to writing, so theyre effectively discarded. I had this one Jon Sims/Danny Stoker dated in uni story (based on another tumblr post, I have no idea where that is though, I’ll go back and edit this with credit if I find it again) that was so sad that my friend went into the groupchat to tattle on me for making her sad when I was telling her about it. I wrote like? Twelve pages of it? Then I got distracted with something else. But I love it still.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

For the character prompts: Jon, of course! And, if you’d like another, Danny :)

Jon:

general opinion: actual love of my life

hotness level: hot jon rights, i'm making a new category for him, hot in a feral, unhinged sort of way, i will die on this hill

hogwarts house: ravenclaw through and through

best quality: he! is full! of love! this man makes my heart hurt. he tries so hard to hang onto his humanity and he makes these awful, clumsy, human decisions which, at the end of the day, ends up being driven by the fact that he just. loves people. he was heartbroken over sasha when he discovered the not!them. he killed elias citing the friends he had lost. the hunters had a knife to his throat and he still was defending gerry's memory. he tried to save jordan kennedy in the only way he could. he loves in such a clumsy, human way and i love that for him. Alternative best quality: he's a total bitch and that's great

worst quality: the boy can't think two steps ahead to save his life. literally. he has almost died several times because he can't plan worth shit.

ship them with: martin, i love them together, but i also ship him with gerry? they shared exactly one (1) episode together but they had a fantastic dynamic in it and they both legitimately treated the other with respect as a person? which is just so huge for characters that were systematically abused and used? they're both people who are isolated and used and still trying to be good. it also just has a huge ships-in-the-night aspect to it. gerry was working with gertrude when jon was at the institute. they just missed each other. and maybe, if it hadn't, they could have had someone legitimately in their corner for once

brotp them with: tim. they! were! friends! I relistened to season 2 a few months ago and tim shows such genuine concern for jon towards the beginning, before it gets messed up. and in season 1, jon trusts him to look into the oliver banks statement when he was worried it was a prank from the other two. we see so little of their early friendship but they seemed to legitimately care for each other?

needs to stay away from: elias bouchard. jimmy magma. that man. my favorite part of nhthcth comments are all of the death threats elias gets. it's great.

misc. thoughts: he's just such a tragic character and he was human until the end. he was deeply flawed and i love that because it made him so human? he wasn't your typical hero protagonist. he was just. some guy. trying his best. and in the end, he didn't win. i love that. like, the real tragedy of jonathan sims is that he was human and failed in human ways, and losing his humanity was what people accused him of most.

Danny:

general opinion: actual love of my life

hotness level: absolutely off the charts hotness, he gets a new category too, this is not me saying this this is god's truth, canonically he is obscenely hot

hogwarts house: gryffindor, my only character inspiration for him was himbo and all the boy wants to do is explore exceedingly dangerous places, the boy is just here for a good and potentially fatal time

best quality: he's very straightforward in what he wants? i'm speaking specifically of him from nhthcth, i don't have much to work with when it comes to canon danny, but like, he doesn't get caught up in a balancing risk and reward like most people. he's going straight for the gold and not getting caught up in logistics. like, he's not willing to play the sacrifice game. tim is. tim is willing to say, i'll sacrifice myself to this job because it gives danny better odds. danny would have said tough shit, we're going to succeed on the shitty odds because that's the one that actually saves us all, fuck off bouchard. like, he would die for the people he loves but he's not going to crucify himself or anyone else early. he's very solid in what he wants and what he's willing to do to get there but he's very hard to play because he's going to go the distance even if it's risky

worst quality: he will not. fucking. back down. ever. which can be a good quality in some things but it can be a really really bad quality in others. he's stubborn as shit and willing to go to ridiculous lengths to realize what he wants and sometimes that leads him to be way more reckless than is necessarily good for himself or for his greater team. he's also kind of bad with nuance? like, with jon, jon's a good person to him. he does good things with his powers. jon is good and what he does is good. simple as that. which means he fails to grasp the sheer cost of the powers and how they're legit bad to use. like, this isn't one of those things where the power is a tool and all that matters is how you use it. the power is feeding an evil god and if you use it, you're choosing to torture the person on the receiving end every single night for the rest of their lives. and yeah, jon's using it against bad people, but the act itself is bad. doesn't necessarily mean jon picked wrong when he decided to do it that way, but it does mean that jon picked something bad.

ship them with: nhthcth danny is actually aroace and has no prospects in my mind

brotp them with: jon. i love him and jon as friends. danny legitmately does not want to use jon, which is something nhthcth jon needs so badly. danny really just thinks he's a cool guy he'd like to get to know and he'd treat jon like a person, not someone who can help him get what he wants. even tim is guilty of that, to an extent. jon is tim's way of saving his brother. for danny, jon is a huge part of keeping him alive, yeah, but he doesn't want jon in his life because it's helping him. he thinks jon is a great person to have in his life because he's the sort of guy who would risk his life for a stranger. also, he's an absolute riot, holy shit, keep saying those words you crazy magic man

needs to stay away from: Grimaldi, the clown wants to peel him like an orange

misc. thoughts: kind of heart, dumb of ass. force of chaos. love is stored in the danny.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

I loved last chapter of nhthcth!!!!! And my boy Gerry. I was so sad when Daisy described how his death(?) affected Jon (Is it death?? Or disappearance?? I am clinging to every shred of hope I have to at least let them have the opportunity to say goodbye to each other even in skinbook form they are my boys and I am so sad for them)

I am so excited by the way you write old Daisy because it's just so in character and Jon really doesn't know how to make friends does he omg he's so bad at interacting with her and the reasons why she agrees are gold too. Love it.

What I hate is how involved the Lukas family was with Jon's living situation when he was studying like ugh. Hate it so much. Neat detail the Lukas lawyer. Loved the concert hated the man. Fucking Peter Lukas involving himself in his life. HATE IT. He must have felt so smug when Gerry disappeared and Jon ended up alone I just make myself mad thinking about it.

At least he met Georgie I guess. I hope they were happy for a time.

Also quick note but I love how we are in the same fandoms because after this update I saw your other fics (the spiderman and the otgw one) and I loved them!!! So great!! I love the way you write Peter!! And him talking to the Punisher was great. Anyway! Hope you have a nice day and thanks for sharing your writing. Always brings a smile to my face to see the update in my inbox!!!

Hi!!! Thank you for coming to talk to me again!

I don't want to spoil anything for you with Gerry and what happened to him, so I won't say anything on that, but I will say that as a general rule--applying to like. basically everything that happens in this fic--any chapter from an outside perspective should be taken as inherently unreliable. Especially if it's stuff that's inferred and not seen firsthand. Daisy's inferred that Gerry's dead, because that's what her context clues suggest. But in the same way, in chapter 9, Martin inferred that Jon is an abuse victim of Gerry (and possibly Elias), and he was pretty off target, but it was still an extremely reasonable assumption to make based on his clues. And yeah, he was in the ballpark a bit, but "my boss is probably abusing his kid" is super different than "my boss kidnapped this kid and sacrificed him to an eldritch god and now the kid is having his rebellious stage against the god he was sacrificed to" like no one thinks that so no one would infer that. So if you're going to trust any inference, trust a ballpark inference, and even do that tentatively.

With Martin's chapter, of course, the reader knows the background of what happened to Jon, so we know he's dead wrong. With Daisy's, the reader doesn't have nearly so much background. The most recent backstory we got for Jon and Gerry was a decade ago. So the reader is not nearly so able to judge what they got wrong and what they got right.

Now, for the record, I'm legitmately not saying all this is about Gerry, it applies to like. Most of the plot points in the story. Maybe Gerry's dead. Maybe he's not dead. Maybe he's disappeared. Maybe he's sitting in a coffee shop wondering why Jon is running late and nothing is wrong in the world. (That last one is not true but wouldn't it be great if it were.)

The general rule that any outside perspective is going to be inherently unreliable is one that I honestly abuse wildly for a lot of things. I give y'all good, solid, true information relevant to the story but then have the characters draw entirely understandable but super wrong conclusions. It's easy to spot when it's centered on info y'all have, but not so much when it's info y'all don't have. I've already hidden the very end of the story in one of the chapters and no one (in the comments, at least) has seemed to see it as important yet. Same thing with Gerry--some clues as to what's happened to him is actually hidden in the chapters, but no one's brought any of them up yet. Granted, I only know what people have spotted from comments, so maybe someone's figured it all out, I dunno.

If you want to try to figure it out? Look for discrepancies. The little things that outside characters learn that's wrong based on what you know. But this applies to facts, not inferences--inferences are going to be wrong because they're an outside perspective and no one is going to assume their boss is serving cthulhu. The inferences will always be good reasoning but this world is so batshit that you can't rely on good reasoning. But if they get a piece of information itself that you know to be wrong, that's because there's some shit going on in the background.

Moral of the story is, cling to your hope! I'm wildly misleading you in every chapter and will continue to do so!

Oh I loveeeee Daisy and Jon's (eventual) friendship and I'm really excited to have to like, flesh it out without the intervention of the Buried keeping Daisy from the Hunt for like, several months of detox. She's full hunter and Jon is a walking disaster who is. not. good. with. people. Especially not this one. I'm also really excited for exploring Daisy having to deal with the ramifications of the hunt without the Buried's intervention once again. It's a very different process and she has a lot of. straight up atrocities to answer for.

I can assure you that Jon and Georgie were happy for a time. I can also unfortunately assure you that the Lukases were extremely smug when what happened to Gerry happened, particularly Peter. They suck and I hate them so much.

Ahhhhhhhh!! I'm so excited you're in my other fandoms!! The OTGW story I actually wrote like, most of it years ago, stumbled back on it and was like "yeah no actually that's fire," overhauled my old writing to be up to standard, tweaked the plot, filled in a few missing scenes and tossed it out into the world. I loveee that story and I'm so glad you liked it!!

And my Spider-Man/The Punisher story!! Peter Parker is my favorite comic book character, I grew up reading his comics, and he's just. so important to me. I love the Punisher, he's probably one of the best executed characters I've ever seen. It's kind of a wish fulfillment fic of mine? Because while I love spider-man and his origins and wouldn't get rid of my teenage superson for anything, I really need someone to be like "actually I'm going to call your parents what the HELL are you doing out here you're like four."

Okay, this got really long. Thank you for messaging me! I hope you have a great day!