Michael Shelley - Blog Posts

hats off to mangus arches fans for the best ship names i’ve ever seen

(alternates under the cut)

Distortion

spiral man (gn)

all its bones are in its fingers :D

ICON ICON ICON ICON ‼️

(Reference: in Christian Dior, Gisele Bündchen & Rhea Durham by Nick Knight)

Is that a magnus archives reference?

The silly

Omg it's Michael distortion

i scanned one of my drawings for a project so i thought id drop it off here too :)

everyone meet my wife

I don't know if it's just me but I feel like an animatic of Michael with the song entropy would rock. I also feel like it sort of matches his character even down to some of the lyrics.

MICHAEL WHAT R U DOING IN DETROIT

The literal love of my life

everyone cheered

Artworks of michael distortion and michael shelley in the same image often draw the former intimidating/enfolding the latter. But that’s not it at all, is it? They’re one and the same, yet mutually unrecognizable to each other. The distortion did not prey on michael shelley, he was fed to it and it was bound to him. And once it became clear it would not escape unscathed, it did not want him. Michael shelley was never even meant for the spiral at all, and it shows in how it acts as a distortion. If anything, the intimidating factor above the hapless human should be gertrude robinson, not any facet of something that could be called michael in some capacity

The thing i both love and hate about michael’s sacrifice was how simultaneously inevitable and preventable it was.

With the info gertrude had, she thought she had to sacrifice someone to save the world. She doubtless thought michael’s blind trust in her was necessary for the plan to work. From her perspective, her actions make sense and couldn’t have happened any other way.

And yet. And yet. It would have failed anyway, whether michael was there or not. Michael could have lived a long and happy life (or at least not been fed to an eldritch horror) and the world would not have ended.

His death is pointless. He died for nothing. And yet there was no path by which he could have survived without changing fundamental aspects of the timeline. Preventable, yet inevitable.

I love big coat and scarf michael as much as the next guy but you have to remember that sannikov land is canonically warm! It’s a jungle! He went through that door with the warm winter clothes in a backpack! Sure, it should have been cold, but that’s the funny bit about the Spiral: it defies “should” at every turn. That said, funny spirally scarves are fun as hell to draw, just probably not canonically accurate (at least as much as any visual representation of mag 101 can be canonically accurate)

i think what michael shelley wanted more than anything was to be loved or even just appreciated, but in the neurodivergent way where you think that the reason you aren't recognized is because you haven't done enough rather than because the people you want recognition from won't give it to you

the distortion reflects this by being bizarrely overt, making campaigns of terror against specific people, being the center (or at least a very hard-to-ignore presence) in the lives of its victims, rather than eating them outright or befriending them like helen does (which reflects a much more businesslike "get the job done, make some connections, and move on" attitude that likely reflects her job when she was human)

hey magnus archives fans i know yall got a lot of mikes… you may even know a mike who isn’t in magnus

consider send one in?

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.

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.

the map gertrude gave to michael of Zemlya Sannikova was one of those mazes you see on kids' menus at restaurants, btw

If he hadn’t been sacrificed, I feel like Michael would have been more a victim and/or avatar of The Web.

I highly doubt Michael was stupid. To be honest, he strikes me as neurodivergent of the “if I just go with what they say, they won’t hate me” variety. He trusted gertrude to not… y’know. Kill him. I feel like that’s a pretty low level of trust, all things considered. He probably knew she was planning *something*, though he grossly underestimated the scale. Consider also that Gertrude was trying to intentionally deceive pretty much everyone so that she could go around obliterating Rituals and being a general pain in the ass to Jonah. It’s not a mark against someone to have been tricked by Gertrude. Hell, he was in an echo chamber designed to keep him ignorant!

Point is, Michael wasn’t stupid. He was scared. He was scared of being hated and left behind and not being enough for others. He was scared of failing people. He’d fall into anyone’s schemes, take any number of hits, whatever it would take to have people stick around and hopefully, maybe, protect him in return.

If it hadn’t been Gertrude and her assistants specifically, if it hadn’t been Fears and supernatural entities and attempts to end the world, he would have been manipulated, rather than lied-to-and-manipulated. He could break the Great Twisting because he *had* been lied to, not because it was the core of his fear. (Ignore for now that the Twisting wouldn’t have worked anyway, if 160 is to be believed.)

And every fear has a bit of manipulation in it, Gerry’s colour analogy rant and all. But The Web relishes in manipulation, in telling you true things that will lead you to the wrong conclusions to do what it wants. Michael was told he could stop a great evil. True! Sort of!

Anyways, Web!Michael when

Daily TMA 110 - Two Paths

The fact that if Michael hadn’t become The Distortion he could have very well become The Archivist

Back with more Michael angst!

The Distortion hates cold temperatures. It didn't used to, but then it became Michael. Typically, the Distortion takes whatever form it likes, though the pattern of something-that-looks-like-Michael is one of the easiest, the least complex. (It's very complex, actually, but Michael Shelley was so good at being this one specific human that, if the Distortion wants to look like something other than a door, that pattern is so close to hand.) But the instincts of Michael are interwoven into the instincts of this endless Concept, and when it's cold, the Distortion is reminded of Russia. It's reminded of a place that doesn't exist. It's reminded of a map. It's reminded of words, that he wouldn't die if he was careful. And he was careful, and he hadn't died. But what happened was worse. It remembers the last time he was betrayed before he became betrayal.

And somehow, lost in all the memories of something that both is and is not itself, the Distortion finds itself wearing a heavy coat and scarf, in muted earthy browns and greens so unlike its preferred aesthetic. Sometimes, it finds that it's crying something that could arguably pass for tears. It never quite remembers how it got to this shape.

That simply cannot do. So it avoids winters and cold temperatures and Russia. Or at the very least, it leaves the door outside, and hides inside where temperature and space mean as much as time and colour and truth.

I wonder if Michael Shelley got a grave. I don't think Gertrude would have made one; she's not sentimental enough for it. If you make graves for people you lose, you might think too hard about sacrificing them. If he had living family, they probably would have been at least a little estranged by virtue of how much time he spent at this job that, frankly, would make him sound like a lunatic to most people. I also doubt Gertrude would report his death in any official way. He would just disappear, never to be heard from again. Anyone else might not know he was gone for months.

The other assistants... they would know he was gone. Some silent acknowledgment that he wouldn't come back and shouldn't be spoken about. Maybe one of them would give him a grave, maybe. Or maybe not; after all, burials generally involve digging in the dirt, and they all knew about the Coffin by then. Who would want to tempt fate that way, and all for one dead man that cared too much?

No, his only grave is a labyrinth of doors. And even that twisted, painful testament to who he was and what he did, is taken from him when Helen usurps him.

you know what

whatever

sure just cuck me tumblr distortion filter

I was simply doing an art assignment and then Michael showed up

I was playing around with my little sister’s multicolored pencils and it’s giving the distortion

Symmetry

Poor little archival assistants, hired too young~

To Sannikov Land, which does not exist and never has.