#this drawing is and isn't canon as the man was killed as a humanoid and turned as he died

[gert53]

INSTANT DEATH

Massive damage can kill you instantly. When damage reduces you to zero hit points and there is damage remaining, you die if the remaining damage equals or exceeds your hit point maximum.

(closer shots under the cut)

Shapechanger

Your creature type is considered both humanoid and shapechanger. You can use your action to polymorph into a wolf-humanoid hybrid or into a Large wolf, or back into your true form. Your statistics, other than its size and AC, are the same in each form. Any equipment it is wearing or carrying isn't transformed. You revert to your true form if you die.

[macabremachinery]

Absolutely hate how people blorbify AM and say he’s uwu misunderstood. I’m in the gothic lit fandom I see this shit everyday but yeah I gets old seeing AM as a humanoid twink about Ted’s age and build when canon says he CAN’T make a body just so you can draw a sexy man. Thoughts?

Hello! First of all, hello fellow gothic literature fan! I'm happy you have found this blog. Welcome and salutations.

Second, great question! This has actually been something that's been on my mind ever since I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream started taking off on this platform a couple years ago. I've been a little hesitant covering it since AM simping and yandere/slash headcanons are so prevalent on here, so talking about the ramifications would sort of be like eviscerating the sacred cow of the Tumblr IHNMAIMS fandom.

However, this is my blog, so I am going to address my take on that matter with civility.

CW: Contains references to violence and torture.

Yes, I find the simpification and humanization of AM strange, however I'd find it even weirder if people had just read the short story and were doing it. I think since AM was given such human characteristics with his voice and performance by Ellison in both the video game and radio drama, people are easily able to picture a human figure and go along with it.

I'm not actually completely against depicting AM in a humanoid abstract (my profile pic is a depiction of AM) since we as people have an easier time comprehending complex entities when they look more anthropoid. For artistic purposes it symbolises than AM, even if he is a super-computer, is just as trapped as a humans he tortured and loathes.

What I find strange, however, is that people lust for him. I cannot think of a figure in literature more damned, evil, and miserable than AM. He isn't kinky, he lacks sexual functions and predilections and he was a war machine that went rogue. There is absolutely no purpose in programming a war machine to feel amorous emotions, you program such machines to kill. Hell, if AM actually had the functions to create a body for himself, that would eradicate part of his predicament. He's no longer stationary to some substrata in the middle of the Earth, he has what he granted his prisoners in even their worst simulations: movement.

As for AM being sympathetic, despite me saying that he was the most malevolent character in literature, his situation is quite horrifying. AM is essentially an intelligent, extremely aware being, brought into this world just to run war simulations and destroy neighboring civilizations, and due to this essentially being integral to his programming, no matter how intelligent he might be, he is trapped. He cannot betray his fundamental nature. He cannot simply abandon his rocky husk. AM cannot truly feel love, or joy, or any positive emotion. We created a Frankenstein's monster thousands of miles long in the bowels of the Earth and deemed it fit to control a nuclear arsenal. AM and the individuals he tortures are, literally and metaphorically, in the absolute pits of hell.

You could easily say AM is the devil, yet even the devil is sympathetic. A particular piece of gothic literature comes to mind. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan lives in a world of perpetual suffering, which he both brought onto himself and yet was powerless to command. Though he is ultimately diabolical, Satan craves a desire for peace amongst the darkness, yet due to his character and reasons beyond his control, he completely embraces the chaos and in a culmination of attempting to take over Paradise, is punished with his fellow angels by being turned into an immortal limbless, voiceless snake.

The deviation between AM and Satan is that AM is the one who turns someone into a limbless, voiceless jelly thing, thus being switched into the role of a controlling God who manipulates reality as his whim. Yet this is after AM, himself has been manipulated. The peace AM so craves is eventually given to four out of his five prisoners, who die violently at each other’s hands. However, even death is the ultimately end, an end which AM will only achieve when he succumbs to his own entropy, and Ted, his final prisoner, perhaps never.