Assigning Moths and Butterflies to the Magnus Archives Cast!
Cw: discussion and pictures of insects
So I drew Mothman Melanie a while back. Because Jon has massive Mothman energy and gets tons of cool Mothman fanart of him but I also stand by Moth Melanie because her dad cannonically used to call her Little Moth. And also idk, her constantly traveling different places at night for Ghost Hunt UK also gives me moth vibes.
Anyway all this to say I'm assigning moths and butterflies to TMA characters!
Squinting Bush Brown (Bicyclus Anynana)
Okay technically this is a butterfly not a moth and it does feel a bit like a crime to make the most notoriously mothman headcannoned character not a moth. But I saw it and it just reminded me of him. It has so many eyespots! Eyes for days! Also it's very small and we all know Jon is like two feet tall.
Also most of the search results for it are of people running experiments on this type of butterfly by modifying their genes to learn things about how genes code for butterfly wing patterns? Jon is like 40% mad scientist, 60% mad scientist's experiment in terms of his energy so this feels right to me.
Peppered Moth (Biston Betularia)
These moths are what every high school class or whatever uses as an example of natural selection. They used to mainly have the primarily white, speckled with black pattern on the bottom, because it allowed them to camoflauge with tree bark. A few of them had a mutation that made them black, and those moths weren't particularly successful until the industrial revolution literally stained a lot of surfaces they would perch on black with soot. Suddenly, the black moths blended in better than the speckled ones and became a lot more plentiful because more of the speckled ones and fewer of the black ones were getting eaten by predators.
That's the simplified version, I'm not a scientist and haven't done enough research to tell it totally accurately. The gist is I think a moth that's so extremely well known for a story about its camoflauge works really well for Martin, whose powerset makes him invisible and forgotten, who's scared of being invisible and never understood but finds safety in it. Also I'm definitely a Martin's hair turns white in the Lonely headcannoner, so I think his color palette matches the white speckled peppered moth at least a bit.
Viceroy Butterfly (Limenitus Archippus)
Monarch Butterfly (Danaus Plexippus)
So I wanted to assign Sasha and Not!Sasha an insect and one of its mimics. And the Monarch and the Viceroy are a pretty famous example of that.
What I initially thought was that the Monarch was poisonous, and the Viceroy wasn't poisonous but mimicked the Monarch so predators would think it was poisonous and wouldn't eat it. So I was like! Great! Sasha can be a Monarch and Notsasha can be a Viceroy, since Notsasha mimics her!
This isn't how Monarchs + Viceroys work, though, and apparently scientists have known that was wrong since the '90's but the general public understanding has lagged behind ig. The Monarch butterfly and the Viceroy are actually both poisonous, and evolved to look more and more like one another so that they could essentially both benefit off of eachothers' reputations. If a predator has eaten a poisonous monarch and gotten sick, then sees a viceroy later, it'll think they're the same butterfly and not want to eat it. If it eats a viceroy and gets sick, then sees a monarch, it'll think they're the same butterfly and again not want to eat it.
So in the world of butterflies, this is super beneficial and symbiotic for both species. But in terms of their reputations among humans (which butterflies don't really care about but shhh) the Monarch is just as much of a mimic as the Viceroy, but everyone thinks it's the original, nobody even knows that the Viceroy is the real deal and also poisonous.
Which in my mind is Very Not Them, so I think Sasha is actually the Viceroy, thanks for coming to my Tedtalk.
I'm going to do more of these, I'm gonna do more detail on Moth Melanie but need to do research and potentially fix some things first cause I think I mistook a butterfly for a moth... and also I will assign Tim a butterfly at some point.
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