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itchyeye:

itchyeye:

it’s always funny to me that clowns and specifically horror clowns are one of my favorite things and i really dislike how tma did clowns… just proof you can’t be good at everything i guess

but i am constantly thinking about how the stranger could have been good and how much that would change my own experience of the show since ths stranger takes up the bulk of two seasons

@florenceisfalling​

i would love to hear more of ur thoughts on this bc i love the stranger in concept but a lot of it fell flat for me on paper

hi yes i would literally love to talk more about this thanks!!!

so, i think the core issue with the stranger is that it’s just too vague as a fear. it encompasses too much, so it just becomes watered down

like yes on the one hand whenever some of the fears bleed into one another we can reference back to gerry and leitner explaining that they’re sort of like fingers on a hand rather than like…. h*gwarts houses

but fear of the unknown/uncanny can get reeeeally similar to the spiral, and the spiral handles/expresses being unsure of your own perceptions in a much better way imo

like, okay so the stranger focuses mainly on the uncanny valley, which can be expressed with like the fear of mannequins, dolls, clowns, etc. but i personally find it more interesting/compelling to express this with things like cotard’s delusion or capgras syndrome. mostly because statements about those things are going to have a more compelling interiority than anything based around dolls that come to life

so that’s sort of the core of why i find the stranger uninteresting? it’s just so tied to things i don’t find scary. like i’ll be real with you i don’t like dolls. i would feel skeeved out if i were in a room with a bunch of mannequins and it was dark. but the reason i feel things like this is tied to my own (extra)sensory perceptions, not the fact that the dolls are actually alive. does that make sense? like it would be more engaging for me to read a statement about a guy in a mannequin factory who becomes convinced that the mannequins are coming to life at night and changing their positions and he ends up destroying his life trying to find ways to prevent these mannequins from moving and keeping watch over them to make sure they don’t, rather than a statement about a guy who discovers that the mannequins at the mannequin factory are actually moving

and many of the fears have lots of varying manifestations. the spiral is a great example, actually. we have sergey ushanka, the distorition, the worker in clay, the creature that lives in the ming vase, the man upon the stair… these are all monsters that have very different MOs and very different presentations and all of their associated statements have a different vibe

but they are all focused on the mental anguish of their victims in a way that’s thematically coherent

vs. the stranger has:

and like yes listed out like this it’s very easy to see the connection, but in practice is just feels… messy? why aren’t the soylent green anatomy students the flesh? they would make so much more sense as the flesh. why aren’t the not-them associated with the spiral? especially since they always pick someone who recognizes them and is then faced with the fact that all of their friends/family/loved ones are unintentionally gaslighting them

there’s just too many monsters… and i think also that the stranger really lacks the sort of worship that a lot of the other fears have their avatars express. like i’ve never got the sense that the stranger has acolytes or devotees. and that definitely seems like a deliberate choice rather than an oversight! but then why was wolfgang von kempelen devoted to his automata to the point of orchestrating the first attempt at the unknowing? he’s the only human/formerly human associate we know of the stranger, so why was he the one devotee when everything else that serves/associates with the stranger is a monster?

like it makes sense that if the stranger’s whole thing is replacing people that it wouldn’t have any human devotees, but that’s also boring to me. my favorite part of the fears is the cult of devotion they inspire from their acolytes so that being totally absent from the stranger just makes it really hard for me to… care. spooky monsters. big woop.

i also have personal beef that such a massive part of this entity as a whole and therefore such a massive part of two full seasons of the show are based in and around russia and i have not once heard one single russian word pronounced anywhere in the ballpark of “correctly”

which has larger implications about how this entity which is based on fear of the unknown is so closely tied to a deeply held british distrust of russia/the cultural divide of russia as Other from the rest of europe etc. (why was the previous unknowing attempted in hungary by a hungarian man) and i wrote a long post about that as well but deleted it bc it’s not really what you asked

basically i think the stranger’s clowns suck because it is more fun when clowns want to eat human meat and also fuck you, and that’s not really what the stranger is about, so there’s no room for captain spaulding or art the clown or pennywise or the killer klowns from outer space because that’s just not the vibe

which is unfortunate because clowns that eat human meat and are going to fuck you to death are like. the kind of clowns that make horror clowns fun. for me at least!