->@normalbroadcast for audio drama posting ! • 22 • tme • if you believe in misandry get out of my house you piss me off • put a number between 1 and 208 in my askbox and i will give u a cool word from my List
god i wish i had a superpower so i could do one singular unexplained thing in public and watch people theorize for years after. like if i could fly the first thing i would do is put on a morph suit and fly over the henday at rush hour and then never do it ever again
funniest thing about this post is how small yet dedicated the fanbase for it is. 71 notes and all of them are the same 5 people. anja's whole blog layout is dedicated to it. i feel as though this is what people mean when they say our time here isn't defined by how many lives we touch but the quality of the impact we have on a few. this joke may not have one million notes but it has changed the lives of like 5 people and that's worth more
Hey if you See This can you reblog this or comment on this with a character you headcanon as aromantic, asexual, or both. It can be canon it can be founded on absolutely nothing I just need more aroace stuff on here #yay
i'm not usually much of a theorycrafter or anything BUT The Harbingers has me thinking reall hard. I really love what it's doing w the idea of power & how it's wielded by those lucky enough to have it & i'm VERY excited to see where that goes.
obv we don't know where exactly that will be yet. but i do have . some ideas. & i may be proven entirely wrong within the week! who knows ! anything could happen ! but i wanna get this out there…….. mostly so i can see if anyone else has anything more/different to say. this show is too new for there to be much discussion yet so i need to be the change i want to see . please feel free to refute or add on if you feel moved to do so🙏
spoilers up to episode 3 of The Harbingers amongst my (LONG) ramblings under the cut !!
ok. considering the overarching themes about power & its use, & the most significant ways our two leads differ, i think it's likely that the 7 angels & devils/guardians & challengers are not necessarily 14 different deific entities, but a mythological representation of the different ways that power (specifically magic in this case) is wielded.
it is very early on to be making big assumptions, but my current line of thought is something like this:
each of the two mages we've heard from so far have powers that manifest in hugely different ways. if there are now seven mages in the world (and only seven) and each of them has a ring, it's possible that each ring facilitates its own kind of magic.
Amy & Adam have each consistently had their own (usually opposing) opinions & methods wrt how power, magical or otherwise, can/should be utilised. this is made clear from the beginning, but we can see it continue to inform their actions (& their disagreements) all the way through the show.
AMY STIRLING: Seven people. All with the power to save the world.
ADAM BLACKWELL: Right. Well, common sense says that cannot possibly be true.
AMY STIRLING: Ahh, and yet!
ADAM BLACKWELL: And you’re not talking like… people with their fingers on nuclear buttons who are choosing not to press them, thus preventing any -
AMY STIRLING: No, no, fuck that. That sucks. I’m talking active, “making things that are broken not be broken” saving the world.
CLAUDIA SKINNER: When Dr. Blackwell first became aware of his supernatural gifts, he surrendered himself to the U.S. Government. When he announced himself to the world, he did so through a newscast. When you announced yourself… you did so by going to a bar. (…) Dr. Blackwell went about the unveiling of his powers as if he was disarming a bomb. You went about yours like you were tossing a hand grenade.
Going back to the small portion of Harbinger mythology that we've learned about so far:
we have 2 sets of 7 figures, positioned as reflections of each other. 7 different kinds of power, and two different ways to use it. with the amount of focus we've already seen on reflections and mirroring, the idea that these entities are reflections over a magical/social axis rings a lot more true to me than the idea that they are 14 truly separate divinities.
JULIAN MCCANDLESS: If the Harbingers had a concept of gods, we haven’t found much about them yet. But we’ve found a lot of records about their concept of the seven angels and a lot a lot about the seven devils. Lots of different fables and allegories, chiseled into stone beneath the ice. Most of them talk about them as these… forces. Trying to reshape the world. And if they came to you, they could give you power. The power to change the world. The trick, of course, was to ask yourself… Am I changing it into what I want it to be? Or into what they want it to be?
there's also a lot in the text already about stories & words & perception, & how the ways that we describe/remember things affects how we continue to view them.
Claudia's whole job is attempting to harness this, & guide people's perception of our leads as a way of controlling the narrative around them.
McCandless admits that angels and devils are a less accurate translation, but he continues to use those words, because they're strong, & evocative - they stick in the memory. it's not necessarily a bad thing, he just knows how to capture an audience.
mythology is full of cautionary tales. we encode truth in fantastical stories, because we can remember a story much more easily than just a moral on its own, and then when we tell each other these stories we are also passing on the important stuff right at the heart of them.
back to the point:
i think that the guardian/challenger figures are the result of a culture with access to incredible power, which over time has witnessed the different ways that this power tempts & shapes a person's behaviour, leading to a body of folklore rife with cautionary tales about that very temptation. it's the kind of thing that's frequently awarded a greater degree of sentience/personality than is actually present (maybe in part because blaming an outside corrupting force is a lot easier than admitting that the potential for corruption has always been within you).
these sets of figures/reflections illustrate different ways that people could/do use magic to affect the world (& in turn be affected themselves). i don't think the rings or the magic themselves necessarily have actual thoughts/opinions/agendas, it may just be straight-up raw power. but considering the way that interacting with it is described as an explosion & the insanely overwhelming experience that must be, it makes complete sense to revere and personify something like that, and of course to then tell stories about it.
JULIAN MCCANDLESS: To study a culture’s religion is to study that culture’s notion of the ideal human being. Sometimes only subconsciously, but still. When we call something a god, what we’re saying is “This is what, as a culture we are going to try to be. This is what we’re aiming for.”
(…)
We act like our gods. But with the Harbingers… you have a mythology where the divine beings from a higher plane of existence are not all-powerful. Where they can only affect the world when we open the door for them to do so. So if we act like our gods… what does a concept of spirituality based on… cooperation do to a society? In a world where god depends on man to act upon reality… what does the ideal man look like?
if i'm wrong, i'm sure it will be something infinitely more fascinating & i will be delighted to have my theories dashed into the ground in favour of whatever that is. i am just very glad & grateful for a story that can make me think this much:))))) (and desperate for even more people to talk about it with pleasee ive converted like 5 people just to discuss it more but i want to hear as many perspectives as i cannnn is there like a discord server or something anywhere😭)
OKAY, so. I also believe the seven powers are, well, just that, each of them having two aspects. Which may be not unlikely seven deadly sins / heavenly virtues dichotomy. It’s too soon for me to claim there’s a dash of that in the mix, we’d need at least one more ring. But if you squint really hard, you could imagine Wrath for Amy (with probable character development into patience) and Sloth for Adam (that would develop into diligence). that would be fun and thematic. I’m a sucker for thematic.
However! What I’m desperately missing from the story as of yet is any cosmogenic / creation myths. every culture has those well preserved. every people’s believe they come from something. as for what we don’t have… Not only the classic myths of “how was the world made?” or “where do humans come from?”, but more importantly: where did the angels/powers/demons come from? were they born or awakened, or forged? we have supposedly 7 super important artefacts and we don’t know HOW they got into the world. were they symbols of power granted or fonts of power captured? did the angels bless the Harbinger people, or did the Harbingers enslaved the devils? did the rings one day just appear, ancient aliens style?
Like. it’s “unforgivable” that we don’t have that info (as I said, super common myths), but I can’t wait to see it as a dramatic reveal at some point down the line. I want all the misunderstandings.
OOOOHH i would be SO fascinated to hear the harbinger creation myths !! we've heard so little of the actual research into them, i'm sure they would be present somewhere in harbinger studies within the world of the show but we as listeners just have not been granted any lectures detailing them... mccandless does say though that there are a lot of stories around these guardian/challenger figures so it's v likely some of those deal with their origins/histories, i wonder if we'll get to hear any of their myths recounted that would be so so sick
the sins/virtues dichotomy could be some interesting symbolism !! from the line of thought im working from currently though, i feel like the less accurate angel/devil labels do a lot of work to prescribe a clear moral good/bad line which may not actually necessarily be present - my thinking is more that they describe a more active vs passive/defensive approach (challenger [amy's style] & guardian [adam's philosophy]), neither of which is good or evil in itself ! it's jsut about how you use it
as for the origin of the rings: i am so SO curious & im really wondering how much we'll learn about the actual nature of them. i would love to know it Alllll i feel like it's very possible we may never get the whole story bc the show is more focused on their consequences in the modern day. ....but i want to knowwww
i think. if we look at how the story is using the rings to discuss the power of money in the real world. it could be an interesting angle to take if the magic used to be a lot more available to the entire harbinger population, & then at some point (or maybe at seven different points over time) the rings were forged in such a way that the power was limited to a single person per ring at a time. i have no reason to believe this is definitely how it went but im just throwign shit out there. we dont knowe
We’re under a severe thunderstorm warning rn and my dad just opened the door to show my dog because he was begging to go out and it reminded me of that part in Dracula where Dracula opens the door to the howling wolves and Jonathan’s like um actually I’ll stay inside thanks
you can stay indoors all day when the sun is out, and sometimes it's nice like a cool draught from a tranquil spring, but watch out because if you stay indoors for two days in a row while the sun is out you start doing odd gothic literature things, stalking the halls and passages and muttering to yourself and parting the blinds to gaze down at your neighbours with a haunted look before turning away to contemplate your mannequins #yourmannequins. three days and you're basically fucked. you have to throw a towel over your head to scurry as far as the store for milk and people jeer at you like frankenstein's monster.
Cryptozoology is my favourite kind of fake science stuff. Wish there was also cryptobotany, like mothman but its just a really big fern in the middle of a field with literally nothing else around it , that spawned in the dead of night, might have killed a few people and never shows up in photos, and no one is sure its even real
what is your eye color. what is your favorite color. what is the color that appears most frequently in your wardrobe. what color is your favorite blanket. what color is your water bottle.
