One of my favorite things about tma is how easily I can correlate it to every other hyperfixation I've ever had. I can make infinite aus and match every character ever with a tma fear entity because every character has fears and scary things they are drawn to and I love identifying them and categorizing them based on Smirke's 14. And I find that, at this point, whenever I find a new piece of media to obsess over, I always get the urge to assign them a dread power. It's like a rite of passage. Call tma Rome the way all my interests eventually lead back to it.
As much as I, being in a human vessel, enjoy the human urge to sort myself and other things into boxes and labels, it does hit me that like. As much as we like and feel that we reflect certain Dread Powers it’s really the concepts behind them that we actually embody. The very fact of being an avatar of a dread power is that they feed on the FEAR of that thing. And I don’t want that at all. I want to embody the endless opportunities that The Vast holds, the freedom. And that intersection of freedom between that and The Dark. How one can be anything in the dark, unperceivable, undefined. Can it be a little maddening? Of course. But it’s the kind of madness that empowers. That frees you. Become untethered
As Lena said, the OIAR's purpose is to monitor and balance Dread. They cannot decrease it, only generate more via externals. If someone knows too much, or is causing balence issues, they are Protocoled, in which they are isolated, their information is extracted, anything useful is saved, everything is burned, and the blame is moved off the OIAR.
Generating more Dread:
The OIAR can only generate more Dread, which is interesting, as to balence something, you can add or take away. However, this balancing act relies soley on adding more Dread. I believe there are possible two reasons for this.
1) To develop the Fears quicker - As far as we know, the Fears aren't as distinct as they were in TMA. They are still muddy and overlapping quite a bit. With the Eyepolcolypse not only casting the Fears out, but diminishing their powers, this would make sense. They need time to develop, to grow more powerful than ever before. We know from TMA that The Mother of Puppets was gaining some sort of sentience. This plan, to "retry" with the Fears, seems like a risk the Web would be willing to take. Perhaps, the Web is still strong, and has domain over the OIAR. Nevertheless, the Fears are weaker than before. They need to grow quicker, even by unnatural means. They need more Dread to be created to fuel them.
2) Dr. Welling's experiments - Dr. Welling's name came up several times in casements during Season 1. He was the one to propose and research a Millenium Exhibition, in which the "bad" was expelled from the world, leaving only the "good," creating a utopia. I believe that there is a good chance these experiments were partically successful, resulting in an unbalanced world, where Fead and Dread were limited or expelled altogether. However, by limiting or expelling some "bad," the world became too "good" and thus, unbalanced. The reason why the OIAR cannot limit Dread could be because it is already limited. Generaging Dread is keeping the world balenced.
Klaus and the Protocol:
Information we have so far (as of ep 44):
Klaus Schweitzer - programmer who was kidnapped and forced to work for the Stasi, created a program with the dates of death of a variety of people; punk, had tattoos of (presumed) alchemic symbols on his body; fled the Stasi and Germany; Programmed Fr3-D1 and possibly other versions of it
Possibly in contact with Lena, who was supposed to kill him
If Klaus Schweitzer is indeed the same Klaus Lena knew, which I believe him to be, I think Lena may have been ordered to inact the Protocol on him. He knew Fr3-D1 and it's programming, and thus, there was a possibility he could destroy it. We also know he has created programs that deal with the Fears and Dread, perhaps he created something else that made Dread unbalanced. Either way, I believe that Lena had to kill him because of the Protocol. It was the next to last step, after all. Whether she let him live or not is anyone's guess. On one hand, she does not seem like a person that would kill another because of a simple Protocol. On the other hand, she hates a job done badly, and is a stickler for doing things right.
I recently had a stamp made for Jurgen Leitner's books and I stamped some of the books in my collection, which I deemed worthy of being Leitners, but I have a problem deciding, which powers they would be apart of, mind helping me decide?
So the books are in order:
an old beaten down copy of The Death Dealers by Isaac Asimov 1958
Teatro Grotesco by Thomas Ligotti 2008
a collection of Edgar Alan Poe's poems in German (I don't speak German) from somewhere between 1911-1914
The illusion of living by Adrienne Kress 2020
A beautiful version of The king in yellow by Robert W. Chambers 2024
A small 31 pages long string puppet play in Czech Žádost Kmotra Jahelky 1912, which has editorial notes from previous owners
A sci-fi book in Slovak Sabotáž na okraji vesmíru by Richard Brenkuš 2016
A book I found in Rome forgotten in an old bookshelf in a park in Italian (I don't speak Italian) Mazzarino e Anna D'Austria by P. Robiquet 1929
A beautiful version of Inferno by Dante 2006 from their series of Penguin Classics
The Encyclopedia of the Weird and Wonderful by Milo Rossi 2023
Fantasmagoriana a collection of folk horror of Europe written in Czech from 2021
Fyzika budoucnosti by Michio Kaku written in Czech from 2011
Vždyť je to hračka by Agatha Christie written in Czech from 1971
And the last one I stamped was my highschool graduation yearbook from this year :D
So which would be apart of what fear and what would their effect be?
Also the stamp I used was made by this user here on tumblr and the creator said it's free for use by anyone :) https://theshitpostcalligrapher.tumblr.com/post/698025734344704000/ex-libris-jurgen-leitner
it's like the Corruption is after me or something. i saw three different types of bugs in my room within the span of a day - one of which i've never even seen before
TW/CW: surgery, generally just morbid stuff, death, might be kinda paranoia inducing, if there are any more i should add tell me
corruption: plants can grow inside the human body
the extinction: around 75% of people have microplastics in their blood
the flesh: butterflies will drink your blood sweat and tears if given the chance
the lonely: it only takes about two weeks without any human contact to go insane
the vast: the ocean is full of corpses
the end: if you die in your house and people dont find your corpse for a few days, your pets will eat you / One Day You Will Die.
the buried: if youre buried alive in a coffin, the chances of survival are extremely low
the hunt: rabies can lay dormant in the brain for 5-6 years before showing symptoms, and by then theres nothing that can be done for you
the eye: there are websites dedicated to having peoples adresses, full names, and contact infos up on the internet (if youre from the US, youre most likely on one of them)
the slaughter: if a kidnapper gets an amber alert theres a 1/3 chance theyll just kill the kid
the stranger: during brain surgery alot of surgeons will just peel back your face like a bannana
the web: tou arent immune to manipulation
the spiral: nobody is safe from mental illness
the dark: the immune system might start to attack the eyes and can make you blind
the desolation: being burnt alive is the worst pain known to man
