I Love When Ficwriters Portray Michael Distortion As Like A Weird Eldritch Cat. It Fits His Vibe So Well.

Yknow what? Fuck it. Boosting my luck stat for this week

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

Reblogs a nearly four year old post i found while looking up stuff about gertrude’s assistants. This is now canon in my mind

Hey so like, apparently Emma Harvey was the one keeping Michael Shelley completely ignorant of all the paranormal nonsense going on at the archives. And it seems everyone (including me) interpreted this as ‘‘Gertrude Robinson never spoke about the paranormal stuff openly, making it easy for Michael to stay uninformed.’‘

But consider an alternative:

Gertrude isn’t super chatty around her assistants in general, however neither does she mince words around them. When she is off to try and find a way to disrupt the Flesh ritual, she just is putting on her coat and outright saying ‘‘Alright I’m going to go and snoop around the place that evil dark monster ate some children. Please leave any statements I need to look at on my desk while I am gone.’’ Michael is like 20 years old and he’s like, uh what.

‘‘I should be back in 3 weeks. Emma, keep that polaroid of me on my desk so if a changeling comes back pretending to be me you’ll know.’‘

Michael: ?!?!?!?!?!?!

Emma just smiles gently and says yes Gertrude, of course dear. And then once Gertrude’s gone and Michael is still shooting Emma alarmed looks, waiting for an explanation, she takes him aside.

“Ms. Robinson is… quite a character,’‘ Emma says with that lilt people make when they mean batshit crazy and should probably be in a home. ‘‘The Institute has always drawn in people with… unconventional beliefs.’‘

Michael understands instantly. “Oh,’‘ he says.

Emma grimaces. ‘‘It didn’t used to come up so much,’‘ she says. “But since Fiona disappeared… well. She’s started to see spooky things everywhere.’‘

And Michael just thinks that’s just the Saddest, you see. What a poor, tired old soul, warped into frenzied paranoia by the loss of her coworker. What a Tragedy. And so now, every time he sees Gertrude cutting out eyes from magazine clippings or recording conversations religiously on tape, his heart just breaks a little. He had a friend, once, who was always half-convinced he was being followed by things that couldn’t exist.

So Michael goes into Protect and Nurture mode.

So yes, Michael does hear Gertrude talking to Emma grimly about how she’s planning to ‘‘save the world.’‘ He catches a few conversations she has about Entities or Powers or evil books that eat you. But all it takes is a few Shared, Knowing Glances with Emma and he just wants to wrap this poor old grandma in a blanket and give her some tea and tell her yes, she is Very Brave and Very Hardworking but she can take a nap now :)

Gertrude, meanwhile, eventually figures out that Michael thinks she’s off her rocker but suddenly out of the blue going ‘‘I know you think I am crazy but really there are 14 eldritch fear powers, you have to believe me’‘ is 1) incredibly undignified and 2) will not make Michael believe her. So, resignedly, she decides having an ignorant assistant probably has its uses.

Does she suspect Emma? Yes. Does she ever have enough proof to confront her? No. No she does not.

Sometimes i look at the reflection of something in my glasses so it looks like im staring daggers into some random thing to my right but im actually trying to, like, read a neon sign backwards

Hi everyone long time no see. There’s a post on the miasworld tag by maddogs187. That is a pornbot. Don’t click on it, don’t click on the profile, they aren’t a new fan, they’re a pornbot with a very nsfw page. Shame the bots hit the miasworld tag somehow (it’s such a small corner of tumblr, h o w)

HAPPY BPM DAYYYYYYYYYYYY

Happy Brutal Pipe Murder Day, everyone! Here are some of my favorite Leitner memes to celebrate. How are you celebrating?

Reblog to hug prev poster (they need a hug)

i would love to hear more of your thoughts on michael shelley!!! 🌀🚪✨

you're in luck because i've sat on thoughts about him for years and i finally feel like i can articulate them. because michael shelley is such a well written case of tragic horror in the horror tragedy podcast. and, despite my criticisms of season 5, it really did do an excellent job in concluding his character arc with the gertrude backstory episode. in a podcast where a common in-universe theme is that knowledge, and the pursuit of knowledge, is dangerous, michael is a subversion in that his ignorance of the horrors of the world he lived in not only didn't save him, but was intentionally engineered to make him vulnerable to exploitation and harm (which, on a broader scope, emphasises the futility of the world of the magnus archives - regardless of whether you participate in or turn a blind eye to the systems at play, involved or uninvolved, you are not safe).

furthermore, i really appreciate the subversion of traditional tropes of the sacrifice as a typically female figure taken advantage of by a male father, brother, or lover, whose tragic and horrible death is used to motivate him (whether to greatness or self-destruction), with michael being a son sacrificed by his mother (or grandmother) figure, who never actually loved him and whose 'frail' and 'nurturing' qualities were weaponised incompetence used to gaslight and manipulate him - and who continues to operate successfully (at least in terms of what can be said to be 'success' in a world like the magnus archives) without being haunted by any apparent doubt about the decision she made, or any hesitation to use others in similar ways, following this betrayal. which makes the fact that he's sewn into the fabric of a being that represents lies in their most insidious form, used as a weapon to devour people and destroy their lives, all the more abhorrent in hindsight - he is forced to not only relive his trauma in an endless loop (or spiral, if you will), but to become the mechanism which enables it. michael is taken to the edge of something evil (at least from a human perspective), and pushed over the threshold with no hope of recourse. there's almost a reverse orphic quality to it - he descends into terrifying other world, one which exists side-by-side with but fundamentally seperate from his own, against his will, and looking back will only cause him pain as he's assaulted by memories of a life he will never be able to reach.

i think a lot of people forget to look past the surface with michael, despite there being an entire episode dedicated to doing so. which is understandable, he's a very outwardly expressive character - but this is intentional obfuscation to hide an incredibly damaged victim whose hatred of this part of himself is integral to his entire reason for being, and which the rejection of causes him to be unmade, incapable of existing as this contradictory nightmare any longer. it's a mercy killing, and yet it is violent and painful, because michael cannot and should not exist, and excising that graft used to muzzle the distortion is as agonising as latching it into place was in the first place. when michael-the-distortion says about michael shelley "he was born. he was pointless. and he should have died." there is an implicit longing there, a rage at the way he was used, his decisions made for him and used to imprison something else instead of ever being allowed to exercise any measure of free will. because michael shelley probably would have died for the archivist, given the opportunity, but he never got the choice.

What if jonah prefers symbolic/nonmoving eyes and doesn’t look through other people’s eyes very much because he’s prone to motion sickness and looking through moving eyes is sort of like watching someone else play portal. Gerry’s tattoos also don’t/didn’t get looked through much for the same reason

New experience: browsing tumblr, reading some long thread, had to put my phone down for a minute, left it on because I was going to pick it back up in a minute anyway. Watched as someone glanced at my phone, and realized I had forgotten what I was reading. Until I was able to get it back and check, I was stuck wondering if they’d seen detailed fandom analyses (branding me as a nerd) or ridiculous essays on linguistics (also branding me as a nerd) when they looked at my phone

In 2020 we celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the Good Omens book on the May 1st, only to learn later that it was not the correct date! :D