so i’ve been having some thoughts about the magnus protocol. because my thought is it’s probably unlikely that the taxonomy of the entities themselves is exactly the same in a new universe, so i started thinking about what some alternative conceptions of how they work could be and i stumbled on one that – though it’s obviously not going to be what happens in the show – i kinda liked and wanted to write down.
so the idea is, what if instead of 14/15 distinct entities, it was seven spectrums, each of which contained a full presence of something and its full absence, both of which result in the manifestation of one of the tma-universe fears. like this:
- scale: the concept of hugeness and its absence (the vast and the buried)
- obscurity: your perceptions becoming strange, or, conversely, reality itself morphing into something unrecognisable (the spiral and the stranger)
- permanence: the ending of your own life, or the ending of everything you have ever known (the end and the extinction)
- isolation: being truly and completely alone, or never being alone again, being a home for what loves you (the lonely and the corruption)
- insight: complete acute awareness, or a complete lack of the ability to perceive that which surrounds you (the eye and the dark)
- pulse: the pulse of the roiling violence around you, your pulse in your electrified meat prison, the pulse of the thing that is chasing you (the slaughter, the flesh, and the hunt)
- control: the idea that you are being controlled, or the idea that things around you can be randomly, indiscriminately destroyed, and you cannot exert any control to stop it (the web and the desolation)
anyway i think the concept of reimagining the same fears in a different way is neat.