Me at 12: Wow, I notice no difference between how nice women and men look, I must be bisexual!
Me at 14: Aaaactually, that's just cause I've never really personally found anyone attractive/been attracted to anyone/had a crush, a mistake I made because I didn't get that attraction was supposed to be anything other than thinking someone is kinda nice to look at... I suppose this means I am entirely straight and just not there yet, and me feeling absolutely nothing (positive at least) when I imagine being kissed etc (especially if the imaginary kisser has any actual features) surely means nothing. I am not part of the LGBTQ+ community at all.
Incredibly unsubtle advertising of my GerryMichael fic:
I'm getting close to being done with the last chapter - and after that I'll start working on that "all of Gertrude's assistants get to live" fic I promised I'd write - but I'm actually quite proud of this particular snippet and figured I'd post it here as some shameless self-advertising. Idk man, enjoy?
He opened the door.
Elias Bouchard waved at him from the other side of the threshold.
He shut the door.
Sadly, Elias was quick enough to stop it with his foot.
“Mr. Keay! Good to see you! Michael was very adamant about us not meeting yesterday, I was worried you were hurt,”
“Not you weren’t,”
“No I wasn’t,”
“What do you want? I’d like to get on with my day,”
“I know you are very capable of retrieving… How did you put it yesterday? Spooky doohickeys, yes?” Gerard flinched a bit at that. Of course, he wasn’t stupid enough to believe he was safe from Elias just because they had a locked door between them, but he didn’t like the idea of his and Michael’s conversations being spied on.
“Yes, that’s… what I did around here before… well,”
“Alright, I’m not going to lie to you - I’m not Ex Mantrias - this is a threat. There is a particular… doohickey I’d like for you to get me,”
“And if I don’t?”
There was a sudden buzzing in the air, his tattoos itched. “Well, no use in threatening you. You can take a lot, Mr. Keay, and even without that, you are very capable of leaving. It would take a lot to get you there, but you can. However, I can make Michael’s time here very difficult, and he sure can’t leave,” Elias goaded, delight written on his features. “You could ask Melanie about what I’m capable of, it had quite the effect on her,”
“He could still-”
“Rip his eyes out? Yes, he could do that. I’m sure you would be very supportive, wouldn’t you? Help him settle in, be a safety net while he learns to deal with a new disability, do what dear old Mary never did for your father?” The itching was getting worse, the buzzing in the air was getting mixed up with the blood thundering in his ears. “But I don’t think that’s how it would turn out, Gerard. You didn’t hear this from me, but Michael is still dealing with the aftereffects of his time as The Distortion. He will never be entirely free from The Spiral, he wasn’t before you met him and he sure won’t now. But right now, he also has The Eye, The Archives. He was always pretty predisposed to that one too, wasn’t he? If you take that away from him, though? It would eat him alive,”
“Shut up,” he hissed, almost hyperventilating.
“Ignoring me isn’t going to do you any favors, you know? I thought you’d be more aware of that, you saw what good ignorance did Shelley,”
He could just punch him, kill him, even. How difficult could it be to knock him out? Elias was small, at least in comparison to Gerard. Still, there was every chance it would have some sort of adverse effect on the people employed by The Institute.
“So, will you help me?” Elias finally asked, reaching out a hand. The buzzing started subsiding, Gerard’s left-hand knuckles were bleeding from where he had itched them too harshly.
“Go to hell,”
“Is that a yes?”
“It- fuck, yes. Yes, I’ll do it, bastard,”
It was very disquieting to see Elias switch from intimidating to a poor attempt at a friendly boss.
“Excellent! It’s a book - your speciality - of The Flesh. Here’s- ” He handed him a folder. “- the info you should need, off you go!”
“What- now? I have things to do,”
“You can do those things later, I need this now,”
“Is this…” Gerard took a long breath, forcing down the urge to spit in his face. “Is this something you’re going to make me do often?”
“No, but it will probably happen again. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Keay,” Elias smirked. “Oh, and Gerard. I would rather you didn’t tell any of my employees about the little trick with the eyes. It’s quite alright to tell Michael, I think he knows what would happen if he were to leave, but if you tell anyone else-” He reached out and tapped one of the eyes tattooed on Gerard’s jaw. “- I’ll know.” Then he turned and left.
Michael has a terrible caffeine tolerance, anything stronger than tea makes him jittery as all hell (I'm not projecting, you're projecting).
I don't know how many of you have seen those videos of people freezing Monster energy drinks into ice cubes and then drink a glass full of another kind of Monster with those ice cubes, but Gerry has done that on multiple occasions and it drives Michael up the wall.
Stupid-idiot-very-unserious Gerrymichael idea because Michael Shelley still has not left my brain (very inconsiderate of him).
Gerard "grew up with only his incredibly unstable mother as a reference for how humans act" Keay lays out this whole plan on how to seduce Michael, doing everything from little gifts to old timey courting rituals. Meanwhile, Michael "not exactly sensible, but a bit more so than Gerry" Shelley has thought they've been dating for at least a month, just assuming his boyfriend isn't a very touchy person.
I could also see this going the other way with Michael "neurotic wreck with self worth issues" Shelley assuming he's going to have to do something spectacular to even have a chance with Gerry, meanwhile Gerard "very limited experience with positive relationships" Keay experiences an entire three kind acts done just for the sake of making him happy and determines "this type of love must only be reserved for a romantic partner".
In either case, everyone else in the archives is both confused and tired of their shit.
Stupid-idiot-very-unserious Gerrymichael idea because Michael Shelley still has not left my brain (very inconsiderate of him).
Gerard "grew up with only his incredibly unstable mother as a reference for how humans act" Keay lays out this whole plan on how to seduce Michael, doing everything from little gifts to old timey courting rituals. Meanwhile, Michael "not exactly sensible, but a bit more so than Gerry" Shelley has thought they've been dating for at least a month, just assuming his boyfriend isn't a very touchy person.
I could also see this going the other way with Michael "neurotic wreck with self worth issues" Shelley assuming he's going to have to do something spectacular to even have a chance with Gerry, meanwhile Gerard "very limited experience with positive relationships" Keay experiences an entire three kind acts done just for the sake of making him happy and determines "this type of love must only be reserved for a romantic partner".
In either case, everyone else in the archives is both confused and tired of their shit.
I think we, as a community, need to stop saying "forks found in kitchen." It’s cliche, it’s boring!! Where's the zest, the spice?! This is why i propose "knives found in ceaser.”
my friends aren’t getting tired of me. my friends aren’t getting tired of me. my friends aren’t getting tired of me. my friends aren’t getting tired of me. my friends aren’t getting tired of me. my friends aren’t getting tired of me. my friends aren’t getting tired of me. my friends aren’t getting tired of me. my friends aren’t getting tired of me. my friends aren’t getting tired of me.
School is currently robbing me of any motivation to actually write, but the horrors (severe obsession with Michael Shelley) persist so I have made
The Full List Of Ways Michael Shelley Screws With The Timeline (that I know of)
Michael Shelley is hired to replace Fiona Law after she gets tricked into The Coffin in 2003 but somehow still worked with Eric Delano, who notably quit and got killed around the 1980s.
Michael Shelley and Sarah Carpenter both meet their respective ends some time between 2009-2011. However, after their deaths Gertrude spoke to Agnes Montague, who died in 2006.
Eric Delano, Emma Harvey and Gertrude Robinson are all mentioned to be about the same age in MAG 167, and we know Eric died before he was really considered "old". This means that for Michael to have worked with Eric, he would've had to known Gertrude before she was an old lady, which makes his view of her make much less sense. He has no reason to assume her to be anything but fully competent and capable to take care of herself if she's just middle aged or something, and therefore she has no reason to start acting frailer to keep manipulating him (as seen in MAG 99).
One thing that never ceases to amuse me about the gertrude-era-assistants part of this fanbase is how the two most popular choices of who Michael Shelley is shipped with are father and son.
What makes it even funnier is that neither of them are (cannonically, but it's Michael Shelley and his timeline already doesn't make sense, I think we're allowed to rewrite it a bit) his age.
What makes it even funnier than that is that they're very similar personality wise. We don't agree on who he should date, but we sure agree on what his type is. (That and like a bunch of other things. For a character that has about 30 seconds of screentime and is otherwise monolouged about by the thing wearing him like a skinsuit, we all sure have very similar ideas about him).
The Curse (Gertrude era assistants thoughts) has once again claimed me.
So, AU where all of them get to live and work together (the timeline gets a pretty severe case of "being thrown in a blender"), an idea that first came to because I desperately want them all to interact. I also call it the "What if Gertrude cared like 40% more about Fiona and Eric" AU, because that's what a good 60% of the plot relies on.
One day (probably not too far into the future) I will actually write this. Currently, however, I am fighting with my first GerryMichael fic so you'll have to do with little bits of ideas.
It's generally implied that Emma told Gertrude what happened to Fiona, just lying about her own involvment. So, Gertrude "blow shit up" Robinson decides to just- hoard artefacts of The Vast and then go get her. It's still a struggle, and she does have to give up a finger for it (she never quite got as far as The Archivist as Jon did, so I imagine she's be able to chop it off), but ultimatly she gets Fiona Law back to the surface. Fiona doesn't know that it was Emma's fault, and is overjoyed to see that she is alive and well when she returns (imagining a scene where Fiona comes into the archives and runs up to her to hug her, meanwhile Emma thinks she's about to be stabbed or something). Fiona, after her long exposure to The Buried (and also the multitude of entities Emma got her into contact with), essentially becomes an avatar at this point, and with that comes the good old semi-immortality. She does her best to avoid hurting people, and when she accidentally does she does her best to help via her work at The Archives. She returns to life before Eric.
In MAG 167 it's stated that Gertrude was fully capable of Knowing what happened to Eric, but decided not to because "it was easier to make him just another pillar of her crusade" or however they put it. In this AU she just... doesn't do that. She manages to pull together some sort of ritual to bring him out of The Catalouge (shhhhh, don't question it, Gertrude is just reeeeaaaally good at pitting The Entities against eachother), in part it is helped by Gertrude finding his eyes in Mary's office (because I like to feel like she would've keep them if Eric hadn't destroyed them). This does get him back under The Eye's connection, which pisses him off pretty badly (Gertrude thinks he can quit whining and be glad to be alive). As repayment for undoing all of his progress for getting away from The Archives, she manages to pin enough stuff on Mary (including, but not limited to; child abuse, child neglect, a bit of murder, kidnapping (of Eric), theft, desecration of a corpse (The Catalouge) and Tax Evesion) to get him custody of Gerard (who would be about 14 years by this point). She also promises that as long as he keeps helping her with her work, she will make sure Gerry and him are safe.
When Michael eventually start working at the archives, he realises that Fiona's and Eric's ages don't really match up with... anything (Fiona has looked eighty-something for wayyy too long and Eric says he had his son when he was thirty five and he does not look like he is around 50) and this gets added to his conspiracy wall (don't worry about that one just yet).
Gerry, as previously mentioned, grows up with Eric. This leads to him being a bit less jaded than he is in the actual series but other than that he remains mostly the same personality-wise. While Gertrude did manage to get him away from Mary, she did not manage to get her locked up for very long (I belive it's stated that Mary has some sort of contact or something to keep her out of jail). At some point after getting out, she finds Gerry and gives him the eye tattos as a punishment for aligning himself with The Archives (I'm sorry, but I needed a reason for him to stay away from The Archives and I also kinda wanted him to have the tattos). This ends up leading him to distance himself from The Institute as he doesn't want any more of The Eye's attention. He doesn't really start coming back there until he's twenty-something. He does still track down Leitners, but not quite as often as in the podcast. When he finally does start coming back to The Archives it's because he needs more information to track one down.
Sometime around 2003, Gertrude comes to some sort of insight about the fact that a lot of rituals require a death to be stopped, and none of her current assistants are very fitting for the role since they're all too aware of what's going on and none of them are willing to die for it. To begin with, she decides that she should hire someone a bit younger than her, but still experienced, to hopefully take her place in case she dies or something similar happens. Emma, however, convinces her that getting someone more disposable to sacrifice would be better, as having Gertrude around for longer would be better for the world than someone a bit worse. In the end Gertrude decides that both would be good, and Elias permits it and promises to find two fitting people that Gertrude can then decide if she wants or not.
Enter Sarah Carpenter and Michael Shelley. Eric gets very upset with Gertrude over this since it means that two more people are trapped under The Eye.
There isn't much to say about Sarah here, since she is essentially a character we've all made up in our heads. I do usually imagine her and Michael to be friends of some sort, but that's just a me thing.
For Michael Shelley, he's pretty damn Eye aligned in this one. It's mostly based on the line "After much serching and despair, it drove him into the waiting arms of the institute", making it seem as though he was spending quite a bit of his life before The Institute desperatly looking for information on The Spiral. Thus the aformentioned Conspiracy Wall. It's like, an entire wall in his living room. He does not have guests over. He pulls a Martin and (badly) fakes his qualifications (I imagine him joining during his late teens, although he tries to make it seem like he is ninteen-twenty. Nobody actually believes him. Both Eric and Fiona are like "Gertrude, that is a child, what are you doing?", particularly Eric, since Gerry would be around that age as well at this point). He's so very shocked that he actually gets hired. The Spiral mark is also there, and it and The Eye end up feeding into eachother because he constantly feels like an insane person due to the stuff he's looking into and obsessing over (the Conspiracy Wall does not do him any favors).
I haven't quite figured out how I wanna do Sarah's and Emma's survival yet. I've got a good idea about Michael's but this is already a lot of text. Gerry lives because he now has people in his life that encourage him to go to the doctor regularly.
I do have a bit of a scene planned out for Michael and Gerard meeting. Both of them are in The Archives after hours, "borrowing" statements for their own private research (as you do). Michael realises that someone has broken into The Archives, and like a hypocrite decides that won't stand. So he sneaks up to him to threaten him with a paperweight. Gerard's first instinct upon seeing him is "Oh, shit, Spiral avatar" and pulls a switchblade on him. Five minutes and an akward conversation later they both decide to just mind their buissness. This does happen multiple times.
I would like to apologise if this is incoherent, I wrote it very late and I'm slightly sleep deprived
The Great Twisting actually collapsed before Michael and The Distortion merged properly. He actually didn't stop the ritual at all, he could have turned back before it happened and it wouldn't have changed anything. Maybe the ritual collapsing was what let Michael get into the heart of The Distortion in the first place. In either case, Michael Shelley's death was completely and entirely pointless. It changed absolutely nothing.
(I would say the same about Tim and The Unknowing, alas the podcast shows that he does stop it himself, so I don't get to add more tragedy to Tim. If The Unknowing did collapse I imagine it would be the calliope exploding and impaling the members of The Circus, that might not have killed them but it would look cool. Or it would kill them, more through the power of the ritual collapsing than the 'being impaled' part, but still, it would look cool.)
Back on my bullshit (talking about TMA side-characters instead of in any way focusing on the main plot) again.
So, loss of humanity, huh?
We see Jon fighting with The Eye's influence and control, particularly during the second half of the series, though we never really see him succumb entirely. Characters like Mike Crew and Jude Perry have given themselves entirely to their respective entities, but some sort of personal will seems to remain for both of them even though they've lost quite a bit of their humanity. Then there's Annabelle, who seems to be a pretty direct extension of the will of The Mother of Puppets.
My favorite example of this, however, is Oliver Banks. He is one of the few (if not the only) characters we see go through the whole process. (The closest any other characters get to that is Jon, who does a pretty good job of fighting the eye all things considered and never really gets to the point of Annabelle's complete devotion. Daisy, who has been a pretty active part of the hunt since before the series started and, as we see with her and Basira, never quite becomes just another limb of the Hunt. Finally there is the Distortion, specifically Helen, though her development is more focused on intentity than morality.)
In Oliver's first apperence (or Antonio Blake) he's more of a victim of the End than an avatar of it. He tries to help people, he suffers under the dreams instead of taking any sort of sick joy in it (as we see with most people who are avatars or are on their way to becoming avatars) and this seems to have continued up until the incident at Point Nemo. While part of the insane stunts he pulled were probably influenced by The End, I'd argue that most of it was a mix of Oliver's own desperation and The Web (I doubt The End could have kept the crew of the ship from discovering Oliver, that does however line up pretty well with the things The Mother does to forward her plans). Even during the journy there Oliver does his best to ignore the tendrils under the ship. It really isn't until they're at Point Nemo itself that Oliver starts showing proper Avatar Behavior.
During episode 121 Oliver is very much an avatar and he's seemingly accepted that, though he's definetly more empathetic than, say, Mike Crew. While he's quite anxious and akward, none of that seems to carry over to his view of The Fears, it just seems to be what he's like (this lines up with him saying he had a breakdown at his job after him and Graham broke up, it was very possibly anxiety induced in some way).
In Oliver's final apperence (MAG 168) he has succumbed entirely to The End, he is calm and objective and doesn't really have any sense of mortality left in him (him directly saying that he wouldn't care if Jon killed him, as in he doesn't want to die but he wouln't mind). He is, by this point, essentially just a limb of the end. If we're going by Gerry's way of looking at it, this particular spatula has lost it's free will.
Oliver was probably the best choice of character for this (even if I'm not entirely sure it was intentional) because he really is one of the kinder avatars. There's never any malice in him and he seems genuinly regretful over the people he knows will die (his brief interaction with Jane Prentiss) and he still ends up as an apathetic servant of The End.
A pretty common theme in the podcast is the thing that drove a character into their role in the podcast coming back to haunt them later (Martin's relationship with his mother, which is in large part what drove him to the institute, has some pretty heavy lonely-themes. Michael Shelley and Tim both die in the rituals of the powers that drove them to the institute and in Michael's case he becomes something that takes people in a similar way to how Ryan was taken. Gerry became part of a Leitner after his death. Ofcourse there's the classic of Jon and the Web) and I think an interesting example of this that isn't discussed often is Gertrude.
This whole post hinges on Gertrude not lying to Elias about the whole "The Desolation killed my cat" thing, so make of that what you will. I know that line is kinda played for laughs but considering The Desolation is the fear of loss, for someone who was already very lonely (as we know Gertrude was) I imagine the loss of a pet would have been devestating enough to leave lasting impact.
Then we compare that to Gertrude's time as archivist. For the first few decades it goes perfectly swimmingly, but then Fiona dies in what Gertrude probably assumed to be a careless mistake, then Eric drops off the face of the earth and years later she finds out he's been tortured in a skin-book for all that time (which she was apperently could have Known, but I respect a woman who puts her fruitless, revenge driven crusade against evil gods above personal friendships). After that comes the worst part, where Michael, Sarah and Emma all die within probably a few weeks of eachother. We know she was genuinely close to Emma, and while it seems she distanced herself from Michael he was still a person who cared for her wholehertedly (I can't in any way speak for her relationship with Sarah Carpenter as we know nothing about her except for the fact she was very driven, something which one could suppose would lead to Gertrude seeing herself in her, but that's a stretch).
I am, for this post, also assuming that those three are the assistants Leitner mentiones Gertrude missing, and talking about, in his statement. In actuality it was probably meant to be Fiona, Eric and Michael (I'm guessing, since those three had an actual connection to the plot at the time of Jurgen's statement, with Fiona and Michael actually being mentioned to one degree or another while Eric's connection lies with Gerry) and Jonny just did some messing about with the timeline afterwards, but Emma, Sarah and Michael are Gertrude's last assistants so for lore reasons I'm saying it's them.
So, Gertrude has by this point lost everyone who was in any way close to her, The Desolation is having an absolute feast. Speaking of, while they may not actually be friends, I'm sure Gertrude felt the loss of Agnes as well. I can't actually say if it was before or after the assistants all died. Agnes had the unfortunate situation of her timeline in any way intersecting with that of Michael Shelley and everything regarding when she died is therefore kinda up in the air.
So, a few years (?) pass and then she meets Eric's son whom she promised she'd look after if he hadn't gone the same route as Mary. He hasn't, so she helps him out and brings him along on her work trips. Then he gets brain cancer and dies. It's implied she Knew he wouldn't be coming back from the US but we can't be sure if she was aware it was cancer. She, against her better judgement, seems to have actually cared for Gerry, making me wonder why she didn't tell him about it. Not telling him also meant she went against her promise to Eric.
My only real guess is that is was a sort of mercy kill, letting him die of natural causes before any of the powers could do anything worse to him. (Although her leaving him in the Catalouge does speak against that, I really don't know what to make of anything Gertrude Robinson did, this is just me rambling).
This probably isn't some sort of revolutionary discovery, but the amount of influence The Desolation had on Gertrude's life, from her tendencies towards fire to the loss that permiates her life, sort of lines up with Jon's relationship with The Web. From it being the power that got them to the position of Archivist to the way it influences them their whole time in the position.
